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HQ  1221  . R69  1923 
Royden,  A.  Maude  1876-1956. 
Women  at  the  world's 
crossroads 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/womenatworldscroOOroyd 


By  the  Same  Author. 
Books : 

Women  and  the  Sovereign  State. 
The  Hour  and  the  Church. 
Blessed  Joan  of  Arc. 

Sex  and  Common  Sense. 

Pamphlets : 

Votes  and  Wages. 

Physical  Force  and  Democracy. 
How  Women  Won  the  Vote. 
The  True  End  of  Government. 
Women  and  the  Church. 

The  Great  Adventure. 

Part  Author  in : 

The  Making  of  Women. 
Downward  Paths. 

Towards  a  Lasting  Settlement. 


Copyright,  Lena  Connell,  12  Baker  Street,  London 

A.  MAUDE  ROYDEN 


Women  at  the  World’s 


A.  MAUDE  ROYDEN 


THE  WOMANS  PRESS 

NEW  YORK 
1 923 


Copyright,  1922,  by 
The  National  Board  of  the 
Young  Womens  Christian  Associations 
of  the  United  States  of  America 


Printed  in  the  United  States 


Second  Printing 


I  Dedicate 
This  Little  Book 
to 

The  Young  Womens  Christian  Associations 
in  the  United  States  of  America, 

WITH  GRATITUDE  FOR  ALL  THEIR  KINDNESS  AND  FOR 
THE  INSPIRATION  THAT  THE  OPPORTUNITY  OF 
WORKING  WITH  THEM,  EVEN  FOR  SO  SHORT 
A  TIME,  WAS  AND  STILL  IS  TO  ME, 


The  material  in  this  book  was  first  presented  as 
addresses  given  at  the  seventh  national  convention 
of  the  Young  Womens  Christian  Associations  of 
the  United  States  of  America. 


CONTENTS 

I.  The  World  at  the  Crossroads  ...  11 

II.  Christian  Patriotism . 29 

III.  Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race  ...  49 

IV.  Woman’s  Service  to  Theology  ...  75 

V.  The  Law  of  Life . 101 

VI.  Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law  .  .  123 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


“See,  I  have  set  before  thee  this  day  life  and  good , 
and  death  and  evil;  therefore  choose  life ,  that 
thou  mayest  live ,  thou  and  thy  seed” 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads. 

There  is  a  choice  before  us  as  people  who  live  in 
a  great  world,  so  knit  together  that  even  America 
cannot  stand  quite  outside  it,  or  act  as  though  it 
were  situated  somewhere  in  the  moon !  That 
choice  is  a  choice — let  me  put  it  quite  brutally — 
between  heaven  and  hell.  Sometimes  when 
people  go  to  preach  what  is  called  a  mission, 
they  lay  before  their  hearers  a  choice  between 
a  future  in  heaven  or  in  hell.  In  a  sense,  that  is 
the  choice  the  world  has  to  make  to-day.  But  it 
is  not  a  choice  between  a  heaven  or  a  hell  beyond 
the  grave ;  it  is  a  choice  between  making  heaven 
or  making  hell  on  this  side  of  the  grave,  and  in 
this  world,  here  and  now. 

To-day  the  world  is  at  the  crossroads. 

Perhaps  it  is  partly  because  I  come  from  a 
country  which  stands  halfway,  spiritually  and 
geographically,  between  the  New  World  and  the 

11 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 

Old,  that  I  feel  so  conscious  of  the  choice  that  is 
before  me. 

There  is  a  great  verse  at  the  closing  of  the 
Book  of  Deuteronomy: 

“See,  I  have  set  before  thee  this  day  life 
and  good,  and  death  and  evil ;  therefore 
choose  life,  that  thou  mayest  live*  thou  and 
thy  seed/’ 

I  suppose  that  choice  has  really  been  before  the 
world  always,  ever  since  it  began.  I  remember 
hearing  Professor  Arthur  Thomson  say  that  the 
whole  story  of  evolution  was  simply  a  record  of 
“trying  all  things,  holding  fast  that  which  is 
good”;  and  that  has  been  the  story  of  every 
species  that  has  survived.  Of  course,  some  have 
not  survived,  as  you  know. 

I  do  not  know  whether  that  amusing  publica¬ 
tion  (it  was,  of  course,  much  more  than  amus¬ 
ing),  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells’  “Outline  of  History,” 
has  been  read  in  this  country  as  it  has  in  my  own. 
In  England  it  has  had  an  enormous  circulation.  I 
remember  when  I  first  picked  it  up  and  looked  at 
the  drawings  in  it,  I  thought  that  I  had  picked  up, 

12 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


accidentally,  a  copy  of  “Alice  in  Wonderland,” 
for  I  saw  there  creatures,  called  the  gigantosaurus 
and  the  brontosaurus,  the  diplodocus  and  all  sorts 
of  names,  that  looked  like  the  animals  in  “Alice  in 
Wonderland.” 

The  gigantosaurus  was  about  two  hundred  feet 
long  and  half  a  dozen  of  them  would  have  made  a 
good  audience  in  a  lecture  hall.  Why  are  these 
creatures  not  to  be  met  to-day,  either  in  England 
or  America  ?  Why  have  they  not  survived  ?  Here 
is  the  human  race,  which,  compared  with  these 
gigantic  creatures,  seems  quite  unfit  to  survive. 
For  these  creatures  were,  in  some  cases,  of  enor¬ 
mous  size  and  great  strength;  some  were  heavily 
armed,  and  some  of  them  were  armed  for  offense 
as  well  as  defense ;  they  had  skins  that  you  could 
not  pierce ;  or  they  had  tusks  and  claws  and  teeth 
and  every  kind  of  weapon  which,  one  would  sup¬ 
pose,  would  enable  them  to  survive  in  what  we 
are  accustomed  to  call  the  battle  for  existence ! 
Yet  they  have  disappeared !  There  is  not  one  left ! 
And  the  reason  is  not  that  they  were  not  strong 
enough  or  fierce  enough  or  heavily  armed  enough ; 
it  is  simply  that  they  were  too  stupid. 

13 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


If  you  remember  the  pictures,  you  will  remem¬ 
ber  how  small  their  heads  were,  how  stupid  they 
looked.  Such  creatures  could  not  develop  enough 
brain  capacity  to  meet  the  difficulties  with  which 
life  was  surrounded.  And  the  reason  why  you 
and  I  have  survived  is  because  our  forefathers 
had  enough  brains,  on  the  whole,  and  enough 
courage  and  enough  moral  capacity  to  make  the 
right  kind  of  choice  when  they  were  confronted 
with  a  new  situation. 

If  you  will  think  back  over  the  history  of  our 
race,  you  will  see  how  new  factors  have  come  into 
the  life  of  Man,  new  difficulties,  changes  of  cli¬ 
mate  or  of  food, — something  that  has  altered  his 
surroundings ;  and  generally,  you  will  find  that 
in  face  of  that  difficulty  or  that  change,  he  learned 
so  to  adapt  himself  as  to  go  forward  instead  of 
backward.  The  whole  history  of  mankind  is 
summed  up  in  that  capacity  for  choosing  the  right 
path. 

“See,  I  have  set  before  thee  this  day  life 
and  good,  and  death  and  evil ;  therefore 
choose  life,  that  thou  mayest  live,  thou  and 
thy  seed.” 


14 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


Even  in  the  short  period  of  recorded  history 
that  choice  has  been  made  many  times ;  and  some¬ 
times  men  have  chosen  wrong,  and  then  empires 
fall  and  civilizations  pass.  If  you  were  to  travel 
around  the  world  to-day,  around  the  shores  of  the 
Mediterranean  and  right  across  Asia  to  your  own 
Pacific  Coast,  you  would  find,  would  you  not,  the 
traces  of  one  great  civilization  after  another, 
which  has  risen  by  its  power  to  meet  its  difficul¬ 
ties,  and  fallen  before  some  change  with  which 
it  could  not  cope ;  something  has  come  into  its 
history,  some  new  danger,  some  new  power  or 
some  new  opportunity,  and  at  that  point  it  could 
not  go  forward. 

But  in  this  world  you  must  always  go  for¬ 
ward  or  back ;  you  cannot  stand  still  and,  there¬ 
fore,  when  any  civilization  reaches  a  point  at 
which  it  cannot  or  will  not  go  any  further,  it 
begins  to  decline.  Although  the  history  of  the 
world  shows  us  Man  growing  more  and  more 
majestic,  more  and  more  the  master  of  the  world 
in  which  he  lives,  more  and  more  godlike  in  his 
power  over  nature,  yet  it  has  always  happened 
that  the  time  has  come  when  that  particular  race 

15 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 

or  civilization  has  grown  tired  or  lazy  or  stupid. 
The  hour  has  come  when  a  fresh  difficulty  has 
arisen  and  it  could  not  meet  it  and,  therefore, 
it  has  perished. 

I  believe  that  to-day  there  is  a  choice  before 
the  human  race  so  great  that  it  is  not  one  civiliza¬ 
tion  or  one  race  alone,  but  the  whole  future  of 
humanity  which  is  in  the  balance.  That  is  my 
excuse  for  asking  you  to  look  a  little  further  even 
than  the  bounds  of  your  own  great  country. 
Humanity  itself  is  at  the  crossroads.  There  is  a 
path  that  will  lead  to  a  human  race  which  shall  at 
last  reach  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  the  full¬ 
ness  of  Christ ;  but  there  is  also  a  path  which, 
if  we  choose  it,  can  lead  to  nothing  less  than  the 
suicide  of  Humanity.  Let  me  show  you  why. 

I  said  that  at  every  great  epoch  of  the  world’s 
history,  some  great  change  has  confronted  a  race 
or  a  civilization,  and  everything  for  it  then  de¬ 
pended  upon  its  capacity  to  meet  that  change. 
Well,  to-day  there  are  two  great  changes,  and 
those  two  together  present  us  with  a  choice  which 
is  literally — quite  literally — a  choice  between  a 
world  so  beautiful,  so  noble,  so  full  of  beauty 

16 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


and  life  and  health  that,  in  the  words  of  a 
scientist  (not  a  theologian  but  a  scientist!),  it 
would  be  “like  the  Garden  of  Eden,”  and  a  world 
so  full  of  fear,  of  hatred  and  of  destruction, 
that  to  call  it  hell  is  not  to  use  language  too 
strong. 

What  are  these  changes  ?  They  are  these :  first 
of  all,  the  world  to-day  is  one  thing.  It  is  not  now 
a  question  of  one  nation  or  another,  of  one  part 
of  the  world  or  another ;  it  is  that  the  entire  world 
has  been  so  linked  together  by  commerce,  by 
scientific  discovery,  by  travel,  by  the  extraordi¬ 
nary  ease  with  which  one  can  pass  from  one  part 
of  the  world  to  another,  that  even  in  great  and 
prosperous  America,  the  wreck  of  a  continent  on 
the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic  reflects  itself  in 
conditions  here. 

I  could  give  you,  and  you  could  imagine  for 
yourselves,  half  a  hundred  examples  of  the  way 
in  which  the  United  States  prospers  or  suffers 
with  the  changes  that  take  place  in  Europe  and 
in  Asia,  but  I  suppose  that  the  most  obvious  and 
the  most  serious  one  just  now  is  your  number 
of  unemployed. 


17 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 

You  are,  practically,  from  a  material  point  of 
view,  independent.  You  produce  almost  every¬ 
thing  that  you  want,  here  within  the  bounds  of 
your  own  country,  and  yet  even  so,  and  even  at 
your  vast  distance  from  that  distracted,  tortured 
Old  World  from  which  I  come,  it  is  still  true  of 
you  that  the  world  is  so  knit  together  that  you 
cannot  disregard  what  is  going  on  on  the  other 
side  of  the  world. 

That  is  something  new  in  the  world’s  history. 
A  civilization  could  rise  and  fall  hundreds  of 
years  ago  and  the  people  on  the  other  side  of  the 
world  might  never  even  have  heard  of  it.  To¬ 
day,  that  is  impossible.  Russia  cannot  perish 
from  starvation  and  the  people  of  the  United 
States  remain  absolutely  untouched.  Europe 
cannot  suffer  economic  dislocation,  cannot  be,  so 
to  speak,  dying  on  her  feet  as  she  is  to-day,  and 
leave  you  altogether  unaffected.  Not  only  your 
human  feelings  for  those  who  suffer,  but  your 
economic  position,  your  trade,  everything,  is  so 
linked  together  that  the  world  cannot  any  longer 
suffer  in  one  part  without  suffering  everywhere. 
“If  one  member  suffers,  all  the  body  suffers  with 

18 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


it”;  in  a  sense,  that  is  even  more  obviously  and 
tragically  true  than  it  was  when  it  was  spoken 
two  thousand  years  ago. 

The  other  factor  is  this :  the  extraordinary  ad¬ 
vance  of  modern  science.  It  is,  of  course,  in  a 
sense,  another  aspect  of  the  same  thing.  It  is 
because  modern  science  has  given  us  the  cable  and 
the  telegraph  and  wireless  telegraphy  and  rail¬ 
ways  and  steamships  and  aeroplanes  that  the 
world  is  knit  up  into  one.  Modern  commerce 
would  not  have  been  possible  without  modern 
science.  But  science  has  done  more  for  us,  and 
to  us,  than  this.  It  has  given  us  a  power  over  the 
world  in  which  we  live,  which  will  enable  Hu¬ 
manity  to  cut  out  altogether  some  of  the  great 
problems  that  have  puzzled  it  in  the  past.  I  do 
not  know  whether  the  name  of  Professor  Soddy 
is  familiar  to  Americans,  but  he  knows  more,  per¬ 
haps,  about  radium  and  radioactivity  than  any 
other  scientist  on  the  other  side  of  the  water. 
Professor  Soddy,  in  speakingof  the  powers  which 
modern  research  is  putting  into  our  hands,  uses 
these  words :  “To-day  science  has  reached  a  point 
from  which  it  is  possible  to  look  out  on  a  world 

19 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 

full  of  energy  and  power,  compared  with  which 
gas  and  steam  and  electricity  are  like  the  toys 
of  a  child’s  nursery.  We  are  on  the  threshold 
of  knowledge  which  will  enable  us  to  rid  Hu¬ 
manity  of  four-fifths  of  the  diseases  that  scourge 
it;  to  lift  from  its  shoulders  the  crushing  burden 
of  its  toil;  to  wrest  from  the  earth  riches  beyond 
the  dreams  of  avarice;  to  make  of  the  world 
something  like  the  Garden  of  Eden.” 

If  I  were  quoting  from  an  election  address  at  the 
next  presidential  election,  you  would  not  believe 
it,  would  you?  But  I  am  quoting  the  words  of 
a  professor  of  the  sober  science  of  inorganic 
chemistry ;  and  he  tells  us  that  science  is  already 
on  the  threshold  of  powers  which  can  make  the 
world  something  like  the  Garden  of  Eden,  which 
“can  eliminate  forever  the  struggle  for  existence 
on  its  material  side.” 

You  will  see  that  to  release  Humanity  from  that 
terrible  and  sordid  struggle,  will  be,  if  we  choose, 
to  release  it  for  the  nobler  spiritual  and  intel¬ 
lectual  struggle  which  belongs  to  that  which  is 
truly  human,  and  which  raises  us  above  the 
animal.  It  is  the  struggle  for  existence  which 

20 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


makes  it  seem  almost  impossible  for  one  to  gain 
except  by  another’s  loss ;  which  induces  that 
horrible  sense  that  when  you  rise  you  do  so  by 
standing  on  someone  else’s  body  in  the  mud ;  that 
dilemma  which,  translated  into  ordinary  life, 
makes  it  difficult  for  you  to  get  a  job  without 
taking  that  job  away  from  somebody  else;  which 
makes  it  hard  for  you  to  rise  in  your  profession, 
in  your  work,  whatever  it  is,  without  feeling  that 
you  do  so  at  the  cost  of  another.  That  is  the 
struggle  for  existence,  interpreted  in  terms  of 
ordinary  life.  To  cut  that  out,  to  free  mankind 
from  that  horrible  competition,  would  be  to  set 
him  on  an  entirely  different  moral  level ;  would 
be  to  release  him  for  the  great  spiritual  develop¬ 
ment  which  makes  him  human,  which  raises  him 
above  the  brute  creation ;  and  this,  says  Professor 
Soddy,  is  what  science  is  making  possible. 

Then  we  come  up  against  such  a  thing  as  this : 
Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  speaking  at  the  City  Temple 
about  three  years  ago  in  London,  on  the  subject 
of  atomic  energy,  used  these  words:  “We  must 
be  thankful  that  Germany  did  not  know  how  to 
use  this  great  power  in  1914.  What  a  use  she 

21 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 

might  have  made  of  it!  And  God  forbid  that 
any  nation  should  know  how  to  use  it,  until 
some  nation  is  morally  fit  to  use  it.”  Surely  it 
must  be  the  first  time  in  history  that  a  great 
scientist,  pursuing  a  certain  line  of  research — 
for  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  is  now  giving  all  his  time 
to  the  investigation  of  atomic  energy — should 
pause  in  his  work  and  pray  to  God  that  he  should 
not  yet  succeed  in  it,  because  there  is  no  nation  in 
the  world  that  is  morally  fit  to  use  the  power 
that  he  is  learning  to  put  into  the  hands  of  Hu¬ 
manity  !  And  is  he  not  right  in  that  hesitation  ? 
Germany  is  not  the  only  nation  in  the  world  that 
can  put  the  great  forces  of  nature  to  a  diabolical 
use. 

It  is  possible  for  science  to  make  the  world  like 
the  Garden  of  Eden !  Amen.  But  it  is  also 
possible,  and  sometimes  it  seems  more  probable, 
that  science  will  make  the  world  a  very  good 
imitation  of  hell.  Some  of  you  have  been  East 
since  the  war  began.  You  know  that  modern 
science,  instead  of  wresting  from  the  earth  its 
riches,  instead  of  abolishing  disease,  has  blasted 
the  surface  of  the  earth  so  that  there  is  famine 

22 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


where  there  was  plenty,  and  disease  where  there 
was  health. 

“Science,” -says  Soddy,  “can  abolish  four-fifths 
of  the  diseases  that  scourge  mankind.”  And 
instead,  in  Europe  and  Asia,  science  has  almost 
created  new  diseases,  has  at  least,  by  its  appalling 
powers  of  destruction,  created  conditions  so 
abominable  that  people  die  of  influenza,  die  of 
rickets,  die  of  tuberculosis  in  weeks  or  days  in¬ 
stead  of  years.  This  is  what  modern  science  has 
done,  and  this  is  the  choice  that  is  before  us : 

Are  we  going  to  use  the  powers  that  we  are 
being  given  to-day,  powers  before  which  the 
imagination  reels,  to  make  heaven  or  to  make 
hell?  To  eliminate  the  struggle  for  existence 
and  set  Humanity  free  for  its  spiritual  develop¬ 
ment,  or  to  turn  the  world  into  a  cockpit  where 
we  shall  destroy  each  other  on  such  a  scale  that 
there  is  nothing  before  us  but  the  suicide  of 
Humanity?  That  is  the  choice  that  is  before  us 
to-day. 

Do  I  exaggerate  when  I  say  that  the  world  is 
indeed  at  the  crossroads?  This  very  man  of 
whom  I  speak,  Professor  Soddy,  who  is  to-day 

23 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 

giving  the  whole  of  his  wonderful  genius  to 
researches  which  he  believes  will  benefit  Hu¬ 
manity,  was  offered  by  the  British  Government 
an  endowment  if,  instead,  he  would  use  his 
genius  to  explore  the  possibilities  of  poison  gas ! 
That  is  not  the  fault  of  any  one  government. 
The  countries  of  this  world  have  the  governments 
that  they  deserve.  Believe  me,  that  is  true !  We 
have  the  government  that  we  deserve,  and  if  the 
genius  of  our  great  scientists  is  turned  to  pur¬ 
poses  of  destruction  instead  of  creation,  it  is  our 
fault,  ours  as  a  nation,  and  not  that  of  any  gov¬ 
ernment  in  the  world. 

In  democratic  countries,  the  governments  are 
what  the  people  make  of  them,  and  that  is  why  I 
appeal  to  the  rank  and  file  of  the  citizens  of  the 
United  States,  when  I  say  that  it  belongs  to  you, 
to  all  of  you,  to  decide  whether  Humanity  shall 
take  the  step  forward  which  shall  make  this 
twentieth  century  an  epoch  in  the  history  of  the 
whole  world,  or  go  backward  into  destruction. 

In  the  past,  perhaps,  we  did  not  see  when  the 
moment  of  choice  had  arrived ;  the  hour  struck 
and  we  did  not  know.  Civilizations  rose  and  fell 

24 


The  World  at  the  Crossroads 


but  did  not  understand  why  they  rose  or  why 
they  fell.  To-day  we  have  no  such  excuse.  To¬ 
day  we  can  see  what  we  do.  We  stand  at  a 
point  at  which  we  can  look  before  and  after, 
knowing  what  we  do ;  and  if  we  choose  wrong,  it 
is  a  deliberate  choice. 

“See,  I  have  set  before  thee  this  day  life 
and  good,  and  death  and  evil ;  therefore 
choose  life,  that  thou  mayest  live,  thou  and 
thy  seed.” 


25 


Christian  Patriotism 


“Jesus  called  them  unto  him,  and  said,  Ye  know 
that  the  princes  of  the  Gentiles  exercise  dominion 
over  them,  and  they  that  are  great  exercise  au¬ 
thority  upon  them.  But  it  shall  not  be  so  among 
you:  but  whosoever  will  be  great  among  you,  let 
him  be  your  servant  ” 


Christian  Patriotism. 


Patriotism  has  been  made  the  excuse  of  such 
appalling  crimes  in  the  past  that,  in  the  Old 
World,  which  has  so  lately  been  the  battlefield  of 
the  nations,  patriotism  has  almost  become,  among 
thoughtful  people,  a  discredited  virtue.  People 
are  apt  to  say  that  we  ought  to  love  Humanity 
in  such  a  way  that  we  do  not  prefer  one  nation, 
even  our  own,  above  another.  They  dread  the 
patriotism  (so-called)  which  finds  its  expression 
in  oppressing  other  nations  and  exalting  itself. 

Too,  often,  patriotism  has  indeed  been  invoked 
to  justify  crimes.  Rarely  has  any  nation  accepted 
Isaiah’s  conception  of  the  “Suffering  Servant”  or 
desired  to  be  “as  those  that  serve.”  The  Jews, 
as  you  know,  resented  that  idea  and  looked  for¬ 
ward  to  the  time  when  their  race  should  be  ac¬ 
claimed  by  Humanity  as  its  master.  They  con¬ 
soled  themselves  during  the  time  of  their  oppres- 

29 


Christian  Patriotism 

sion  and  servitude  with  the  hope  that  the  time 
would  come  when  God’s  chosen  people  should  be 
the  lords  and  governors  of  the  world. 

The  prophet  Isaiah,  in  that  most  moving  and 
inspiring  passage  of  the  Suffering  Servant  sug¬ 
gests  to  them  that  they  have  misunderstood  the 
purpose  of  God,  and  that  Israel  was  to  serve  the 
world,  not  in  magnificence  and  in  power,  but  in 
suffering  and  humility.  And  our  Lord  says  to 
his  disciples,  “Whosoever  will  be  great  among 
you,  let  him  be  your  servant.” 

It  is  easy  to  think  that  patriotism  is  not  com¬ 
patible  with  Christian  teaching,  if  national  ambi¬ 
tion  is  patriotism ;  and  when  you  consider  what 
so-called  patriotism  is  doing  to-day  in  Europe, 
and  what  it  has  done  for  the  last  six  or  seven 
years,  when  you  see  every  little  nation  trying  to 
arm  itself  to  the  teeth  in  order  to  commit  aggres¬ 
sions  against  its  neighbor  in  the  name  of  patriot¬ 
ism,  you  may  easily  feel,  as  many  thinking  people 
do  in  Europe,  that  patriotism  is  not  a  Christian 
virtue;  that  we  ought  to  love  the  whole  of  Hu¬ 
manity  in  such  a  way  that  it  is  not  possible  for 
us  to  prefer  our  own  nation  above  any  other. 


30 


Christian  Patriotism 


Yet  I  believe  that  this  is  as  unreasonable  as  to 
claim  that,  because  our  Lord  taught  us  to  love  all 
the  world,  we  ought  not  especially  to  love  our 
own  people.  The  Christian  ideal  does  not  con¬ 
flict  with  family  love;  on  the  contrary,  I  often 
think  that  a  Christian  home  is  really  the  greatest 
success  that  Christian  teaching  has  yet  produced. 
Going  up  and  down  the  world  as  I  do,  and  sleep¬ 
ing  often  night  after  night  in  a  different  home, 
I  am  often  conscious,  the  moment  I  enter  a  house, 
of  an  atmosphere  of  such  grace  and  courtesy, 
such  gentleness  and  consideration  and  love,  that 
it  seems  to  me  that  the  kingdom  of  heaven  really 
has  been  realized  in  the  Christian  home.  Of 
course,  there  are  homes  which  are  the  opposite  of 
all  this,  but  all  of  us  at  least  know  some  such 
homes  as  I  have  described ;  many  of  you,  I  hope, 
live  in  such  homes,  where  the  whole  atmosphere 
is  one  of  consideration  and  love,  where  the  strong 
serve  the  weak  and  where  each  expects  the  best 
of  the  other — where  there  is  an  atmosphere  so 
gracious,  so  lovely,  that  it  makes  one  realize  that 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  not  an  impossible 

31 


Christian  Patriotism 


ideal,  but  that  the  kingdom  of  heaven  has  indeed 
touched  earth  in  some  Christian  homes. 

Yet  I  have  no  doubt  that,  at  first,  it  seemed  to 
many  people  that  Christian  teaching  must  destroy 
the  home.  If  you  think  of  the  old  family  idea, 
when  the  family  was  the  property  of  the  head  of 
the  household,  when  the  father  governed  his  wife 
and  children,  having  over  them  powers  of  life 
and  death,  I  expect  that  it  seemed  to  them — and 
I  am  perfectly  certain  that  if  they  saw  American 
homes  to-day,  they  would  be  confirmed  in  the 
idea — that  Christianity  was  destroying  the  pos¬ 
sibility  of  family  life.  If  they  saw  how  American 
parents  hold  their  children  in  awe  instead  of  the 
children  holding  their  parents  in  awe,  I  am  sure 
that  they  would  say,  “You  see  the  result  of  this 
destructive  teaching !”  And,  in  a  sense,  it  is  true 
that  what  seemed  to  them  the  very  essence  of 
family  life  has  vanished  under  Christian  influ¬ 
ence.  Instead  of  the  idea  of  property,  of  power, 
of  authority,  there  is  the  feeling  that  the  home  is 
based  upon  love,  and  that  love  desires  service 
more  than  authority.  There  is  a  certain  freedom 
in  a  Christian  home  which  comes,  undoubtedly, 

32 


Christian  Patriotism 


of  devotion  to  an  even  greater  than  earthly  love, 
a  love  which  makes  us  understand  how  a  spirit  so 
gracious  and  lovely  as  that  of  Christ  could  say  to 
his  disciples :  “He  that  hateth  not  his  father  and 
mother  ....  cannot  be  my  disciple.” 

In  just  the  same  way,  Christianity  has  trans¬ 
formed  our  love  of  country.  I  do  not  believe  that 
Jesus  Christ  had  that  abstract  love  of  Humanity 
which  rules  out  personal  friendship;  He  was 
far  too  gloriously  human  not  to  have  personal 
friends ;  and,  in  the  same  way,  I  am  persuaded 
that  He  had  a  deep  personal  love  for  his  own 
people,  his  own  nation. 

The  most  tragic  cry  that  sounds  to  us  out  of 
the  pages  of  the  past  is  the  cry  of  Christ’s  disap¬ 
pointment  with  his  own  people,  and  you  cannot 
help  feeling,  I  think,  as  He  looked  down  on 
Jerusalem  and  uttered  those  moving  words: 
“How  often  would  I  have  gathered  thy  children 
together,  as  a  hen  gathers  her  brood  under  her 
wings,  and  ye  would  not.  Behold  your  house  is 
left  unto  you  desolate !” — that  those  words  are 
tragic  and  moving,  just  because  they  are  so  pro¬ 
foundly  human.  They  make  you  feel  that  Christ 

33 


Christian  Patriotism 

was  moved  to  tears  not  only  because  the  world 
had  cast  Him  out,  but  because  his  own  people 
had  done  so. 

I  remember  reading  a  short  time  ago  a  little 
poem  by  an  English  sailor,  a  man  who  was  in 
the  Jutland  battle,  in  which  he  describes  his  sense 
of  his  own  narrow  little  heart,  which  can  only 
love  the  people  it  really  knows,  compared  with 
the  great  passion  for  Humanity  which  animated 
our  Lord;  and  yet,  he  says,  “Although  this  is 
true,  and  our  Lord  loved  all  the  world,  yet  surely 
there  was  in  his  heart,  even  in  his  heart,  a 
peculiar  love  for  his  own  people.” 

“I  would  not  mind  to  die  for  them, 

My  own  dear  downs  and  comrades  true ; 

But  that  great  Heart  of  Bethlehem, 

He  died  for  men  he  never  knew. 

“And  yet  I  think,  on  Golgotha, 

When  Jesus’  eyes  were  closed  in  death, 

He  saw  with  a  most  passionate  love 
The  little  streets  of  Nazareth.” 

Does  not  that  appeal  to  one’s  sense  of  what  is 
fundamentally  true?  Our  Lord  loved  his  own 

34 


Christian  Patriotism 


people,  and  the  tragedy  to  Him  of  his  failure  was 
deepened  and  intensified  by  the  fact  that  it  was 
his  own  people  who  had  failed.  He  was  the 
embodiment  of  that  old  idea  of  the  Suffering 
Servant.  To  Him,  every  nation  had  its  great 
gift,  given  to  it  by  God,  but  not  for  itself — for 
the  world !  And  the  supreme  gift  of  the  Jewish 
race  was  a  spiritual  and  religious  genius  which 
taught  the  Jew  that  God  made  man  in  his  own 
image,  that  there  was  in  man  something  divine 
which  makes  him  the  child  of  God ;  and  his 
limitation  lay  in  the  fact  that  he  conceived  this 
only  about  the  Jewish  race. 

Our  Lord’s  mission  was  first  of  all  to  the 
Jews :  “I  come  to  the  lost  sheep  of  the  house  of 
Israel.”  “These,”  He  implies,  “are  my  people; 
these  are  the  ones  whose  gift  I  understand. 
Their  supreme  genius  is  their  sense  of  the 
Fatherhood  of  God  and,  therefore,  their  service 
to  the  world  is  to  teach  the  world  that  God  is  a 
Father.  They  know  that  God  has  led  them 
throughout  the  ages.  They  know  that  in  them 
there  is  a  divine  spirit  which  makes  them  the 
children  of  God.  That  is  theirs  to  give  to  the 

35 


Christian  Patriotism 


world,  not  theirs  to  keep  to  themselves,  to  make 
them  spiritually  arrogant,  to  make  them  desire 
to  dominate  the  world;  but  theirs  to  share.  He 
that  is  greatest  among  you,  let  him  be  your 
servant. 

“This  gift,”  He  says,  “this  religious  genius, 
which  has  taught  you  that  God  is  your  Father, 
is  now  yours  to  give  to  the  world ;  and  your  glory 
shall  be,  not  that  you  alone  are  God’s  children, 
but  that  to  you  has  been  given  this  great  gospel — 
that  all  mankind  is  of  the  family  of  God.” 

Now  the  Jews  were  furious  at  that  conception 
of  patriotism.  To  them  the  Christ  was  to  be  a 
conqueror,  a  king  in  the  earthly  sense.  Through¬ 
out  his  ministry  you  can  see  how  they  hoped  that 
Jesus  of  Nazareth  was  going  to  be  that  great 
conqueror;  and  when  they  found  He  would  not, 
when  they  tried  to  force  Him  into  the  position  of 
a  leader  and  a  king,  and  He  refused,  then  they 
turned  against  Him  and  said,  “Not  this  man,  but 
Barabbas.” 

Again  and  again  in  the  history  of  the  world, 
the  anger  of  the  world  against  Christians  has  been 
aroused,  not  because  they  believed  this  or  that  or 

36 


Christian  Patriotism 


the  other  about  God — the  world  is  not  interested 
in  what  we  believe — but  because  the  Christian 
has  seemed  to  be  a  bad  citizen.  You  see,  our 
Lord,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  Jews,  was  a 
bad  Jew;  He  wanted  the  Jews  to  serve  the  world, 
and  they  wanted  the  Jews  to  rule  the  world.  He 
conceived  of  patriotism  as  a  spiritual  service,  and 
they  thought  of  it  as  a  magnificent  earthly 
ambition. 

Early  in  the  history  of  the  Church,  you  will 
find  that  the  persecutions  of  the  Christians  under 
the  Roman  empire  were  not  against  Christianity 
as  a  body  of  religious  belief,  but  against  the 
Christians  because  they  were  bad  citizens;  they 
would  not  worship  the  Roman  emperor.  Any 
educated  person  in  the  Roman  empire  knew  that 
the  emperor  was  not  a  god,  but  to  throw  a  little 
incense  on  his  altar  was  just  an  expression  of 
loyalty.  It  meant  that  you  were  a  “hundred  per 
cent”  Roman  citizen.  To  refuse  meant  that  you 
were  a  bad  citizen  who  should  be  thrown  to  the 
lions. 

Over  and  over  again  in  the  history  of  the 
world,  the  conception  of  Christian  patriotism, 

37 


Christian  Patriotism 

which  is  service,  has  seemed  to  the  world  bad 
patriotism  or  an  absence  of  patriotism;  and  the 
transforming  power  of  Christ,  which  teaches  that 
real  love  of  country  should  be  an  understanding 
of  one’s  country’s  gift  to  the  world,  and  a  desire 
to  serve,  has  always  seemed,  at  the  time,  to  be  a 
wicked  and  treacherous  ideal.  I  say,  at  the  time, 
because  as  the  nations  recede  into  the  past  and 
our  angry  passions  die,  and  other  nations  rise  to 
take  their  place,  everyone  can  see  that  what 
Christ  taught  was  true. 

What  service  does  the  world  owe  to  the  Jews? 
A  spiritual  one.  What  does  the  world  owe  to 
Greece  ?  Does  the  world  care  what  battles  Greece 
fought  and  won?  How  many  of  you  know  the 
names  of  her  battles  or  whether  or  not  she  won 
or  lost  them  ?  Greece  is  to  the  world  the  ideal  of 
beauty,  and  all  the  world  pays  homage  to  Greece 
because  of  her  great  genius  for  beauty.  So  it  is 
with  all  nations.  It  is  not  the  conquests  that 
they  made,  it  is  the  service  that  they  rendered, 
which,  as  they  recede  into  the  past,  we  can  see 
was  their  real  greatness  and  their  glory. 

Can  we  to-day  rise  to  the  ideal  of  a  patriotism 

38 


Christian  Patriotism 


which  is  not  that  cold  and  colorless  thing  which 
rules  out  all  especial  love  of  country,  which 
teaches  that  people  should  love  everyone  alike, — 
a  thing  impossible  to  the  human  spirit — which 
asks  us  to  love  Humanity  with  a  capital  “H,” 
and  not  to  love  our  own  country  more  than 
others?  Can  we  reconcile  our  belief  that  we 
have  not  only  a  right  but  a  duty  to  love  our  own 
country,  with  that  spiritual  understanding  of 
what  love  of  country  ought  to  mean?  Can  we,  in 
fact,  conceive  at  last  of  a  Christian  patriotism? 
It  is  that  which  alone  can  save  the  world  to-day. 

Many  of  those  who  think  and  feel  as  I  do,  on 
the  whole,  on  most  national  and  international 
subjects,  regard  nationalism  as  a  passion  so  per¬ 
verted  that  we  must  seek  to  rise  altogether  above 
it.  I  think  they  are  wrong.  Love  of  country  is 
a  passion  so  deeply  rooted  in  the  heart  of  Man 
that  I  cannot  believe  it  is  wrong  or  base.  I  am 
certain  that  like  the  love  of  friends,  like  the  love 
of  parents,  like  the  love  of  children,  it  is  essen¬ 
tially  noble  and  sacred.  But  if  this  is  so,  and  if 
you  cannot  and  do  not  desire  to  cast  it  out  of 
the  human  heart,  you  must  transform  it,  unless 

39 


Christian  Patriotism 

the  world  is  to  be  forever  the  tragic  battlefield  of 
nations  that  so  large  a  part  of  it  is  to-day. 

“Wider  still  and  wider,  let  her  bounds  be  set,” 
writes  a  modern  English  poet  of  the  British 
empire,  “God  who  made  her  mighty,  make  her 
mightier  yet.”  But  that  ideal,  though  so  nobly 
expressed,  must,  if  it  remains  in  our  hearts,  for¬ 
ever  bring  us  into  conflict  with  all  the  other 
nations  of  the  world.  It  is  an  ideal  which  makes 
battle  and  war  inevitable.  “God  who  made  her 
mighty,  make  her  mightier  yet.”  At  whose  ex¬ 
pense?  At  the  expense  of  some  other  nation, 
some  other  people,  the  loss  of  whom  leaves  all 
Humanity  poorer;  at  the  loss  of  some  national 
gift,  some  national  genius  which,  though  it  be 
enshrined  in  some  small  and  weak  nation,  is  not 
the  less  precious  to  the  spiritual  experience  of 
humankind. 

Some  of  the  smallest  nations,  the  Jews  them¬ 
selves,  have  given  the  greatest  gifts  to  Humanity  ; 
and  that  nation  whose  patriotism  takes  the  form 
of  desiring  forever  to  be  mightier  and  mightier, 
engenders  in  the  hearts  of  its  citizens  contempt 

40 


Christian  Patriotism 


for  the  genius  of  other  nations  and  a  determina¬ 
tion  to  dominate  them  at  any  cost  to  Humanity. 

Now  is  it  possible  for  you  of  America  to  give 
to  the  world  a  nobler  conception  than  that?  It 
seems  to  me  sometimes  as  though  it  were  pecu¬ 
liarly  your  vocation.  In  the  Old  World  we  are 
so  torn  with  war,  our  spirits  are  so  poisoned 
with  suffering  and  hatred  that  it  seems,  humanly 
speaking,  impossible  for  a  newer,  saner,  more 
human  conception,  a  more  Christian  idea  of  pa¬ 
triotism  to  be  born.  I  have  no  desire,  even  in  the 
remotest  corner  of  my  mind,  to  suggest  to  you  in 
what  way  your  country  should  come  to  the  help 
of  the  world.  I  am  perhaps  fortunate  in  this,  that 
I  have  truly  no  prepossession  as  to  any  particular 
political  or  economic  entanglement  which  might 
help  us  and  cost  you  something.  I  cannot  my¬ 
self  see  what  it  is  that  in  actual,  practical  terms 
of  politics  or  economics,  you  ought,  as  a  nation, 
to  do  or  not  to  do.  But  I  am  certain  that  there 
is  a  spiritual  gift  that  you  can  give  to  the  world, 
and  I  do  not  see  from  what  other  nation  that 
gift  to-day  is  possible.  In  the  history  of  the 
ages,  is  it  not  possible  that  the  United  States  will 

41 


Christian  Patriotism 

stand  for  something  more  wonderful,  more 
glorious  than  greatness  in  numbers,  size  or 
wealth  ? 

That  you  are  great  in  numbers  and  in  wealth 
and  in  the  vast  area  of  your  country  is  absolutely 
nothing  to  Humanity,  except  an  opportunity.  In 
itself  it  is  nothing,  absolutely  nothing!  Greatness 
does  not  consist  in  your  numbers  or  your  wealth. 
Do  not  be  proud  of  these  things.  But  there  are 
two  things  that  you  have,  and  one  of  them  is 
opportunity;  for  what  a  nation  so  great  mate¬ 
rially  does  in  the  world  comes  to  the  world  with 
an  added  prestige  because  of  its  material  great¬ 
ness.  It  is  a  stupid  judgment,  if  you  will  forgive 
my  saying  so,  a  very  stupid  judgment,  for  the 
smallest  countries  have  sometimes  done  the  great¬ 
est  things.  But  it  is  a  fact  that  that  which  comes 
from  a  country  so  great  materially  does  come 
with  peculiar  prestige  and  authority.  What  you 
do  here  is  of  enormous  importance,  just  because 
you  are  materially  so  impressive. 

Secondly,  you  have  not — will  you  forgive  my 
saying  it? — suffered  quite  so  much  as  the  Old 
World  has.  You  have  known  what  it  is  to  be 

42 


Christian  Patriotism 


at  war  for  a  little  while,  and  that  must  have 
left — as  modern  war  does  leave — a  shadow  on 
your  hearts.  But  if  you  will  try  to  realize  what  it 
means  to  have  lived  in  that  shadow  for  nearly 
four  and  a  half  years,  you  will  also  realize,  I 
think,  that  your  comparative  immunity  gives  you 
a  certain  responsibility  for  the  world’s  future. 

I  cannot  help  sympathizing  deeply  with  the 
feeling  that  some  of  you  have,  that  the  Old  World 
is  too  rancorous,  too  vindictive,  too  cruel,  too 
blood-thirsty  for  you  to  be  able  to  help  it.  Yet 
I  would  like  to  convince  you  that,  if  we  do  not 
forgive  one  another  in  Europe  to-day,  it  is  not 
our  hearts  that  refuse,  nor  is  it  our  judgment; 
it  is  our  nerves.  It  is  because  we  are  in  such 
grief ;  because  the  wounds  of  war  are  so  terrible 
and  so  recent,  that  we  are  like  people  who  have 
got  on  each  other’s  nerves.  Such  nervous  ten¬ 
sion  often  leads  to  greater  cruelty,  to  a  greater 
vindictiveness  and  wickedness,  than  there  seems 
any  reason  or  excuse  for. 

To-day  what  is  the  matter  with  the  Old  World 
is  the  impossibility  of  reacting  quickly  from  so 
great  a  nervous  strain.  In  such  an  atmosphere, 

43 


Christian  Patriotism 

people  hate  as  easily  as,  normally,  they  loved,  and 
the  new  world  cannot  be  born  out  of  hatred. 
They  hate,  and  they  despair.  What  strikes  me 
most,  in  coming  to  your  country  out  of  that  at¬ 
mosphere,  is  that  hope  is  so  easy  to  most  of  you. 
Hope  is  a  virtue  that  is  almost  dead  outside 
America,  and  despair  is  the  characteristic  vice  of 
the  war-stricken  countries. 

Your  service  to  the  world  is  in  some  way, 
which  is  for  you  to  find,  to  convince  us  that  love 
is  still  a  practicable  virtue  and  that  hope  is  the 
normal  condition  of  mankind.  Can  you  solve 
your  own  problems  by  love?  You  have  problems 
as  great  as  ours,  in  some  respects  even  greater. 
The  great  strike  which  is  going  on  at  this  moment 
is  symbolic  of  labor  troubles  more  full  of  the 
possibility  of  disaster  than  even  the  labor  troubles 
of  the  Old  World ;  your  long  line  of  unemployed, 
your  color  problem,  all  the  problems  that  you 
have  to  face — you  know  them  better  than  I — 
seem  to  me,  in  some  respects,  even  greater  than 
ours.  But  you  have  hope  to  solve  them  with, 
and  your  spirits  are  not  poisoned  with  hatred. 
Therefore,  you  ought  to  be  able  to  solve  them, 

44 


Christian  Patriotism 


and,  therefore,  you  should  be  determined  to  do 
so.  The  vastness  of  their  scale,  the  great  size 
of  the  country  with  which  you  have  to  deal,  your 
distances,  your  crowds,  ought  not  to  depress 
your  spirit,  because  your  spirit  is  still  capable  of 
hope,  thinks  of  hope  as  a  normal,  an  ordinary 
state  of  mind. 

This  is  the  spiritual  debt  that  you  owe  to  the 
world :  to  keep  alive  here  in  the  United  States 
that  spirit  of  love  which  is  comparatively  easy 
to  you  (and  if  it  does  not  seem  easy  to  you,  I 
ask  you  to  consider  how  impossible  it  must  seem 
to  us),  to  keep  alive  here  in  America  not  only 
hope  but  that  on  which  hope  is  built — achieve¬ 
ment. 

You  should  not  rest  content  to  leave  any  of 
your  problems  unsolved.  This  is  the  spiritual 
opportunity  of  America;  all  the  rest  is  a  little 
thing — your  material  greatness,  your  wealth, 
your  power,  all  those  things  that  constitute  “one 
hundred  per  cent  Americanism,”  are  nothing  but 
your  opportunity.  They  are  to  you  simply  the 
chance  of  giving  a  leadership,  a  spiritual  leader¬ 
ship  to  all  the  world. 


45 


Christian  Patriotism 


I  repeat,  I  am  not  dictating  to  you  or  even 
suggesting  to  you  in  what  way  such  a  spirit  of 
Christian  patriotism  can  be  worked  out  in  prac¬ 
tice.  But  I  beseech  you  to  remember  that  of  all 
the  peoples  in  the  world,  you  have  the  greatest  gift 
of  hope;  love  is  to  you  most  possible.  To  give 
to  the  world  that  hope,  to  convince  the  world  that 
love  is  still  the  normal  condition  of  Humanity,  to 
purify  the  atmosphere  so  that  our  poisoned  spirits 
shall  at  last  recover  the  possibility  also  of  love 
and  hope,  this  is  to  conceive  of  patriotism  as 
Christ  did ;  this  is  to  render  to  the  world  a  service 
which  will  constitute  your  claim  to  the  immortal 
gratitude  of  all  the  world.  This  is  indeed  to 
give  to  the  world  a  new  gift  and  to  civilization 
new  wealth. 

O  God,  to  Whom  every  nation  is  holy,  make 
this  great  nation  holier  yet.  Amen. 


46 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


“Who  knoweth  whether  thou  art  come  to  the 
kingdom  for  such  a  time  as  this?” 


\ 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race. 


“The  modern  world  has  been  dominated  by  man, 
it  has  been  a  world  of  conquest,  of  force,  of  war. 
No  one  will  be  able  to  tell  us  whether  or  not  the 
physical  evolution  of  the  race  made  such  a  course 
essential,  but  there  is  nothing  surer  thaii  the  fact 
that  the  continuance  of  a  world  order  based  on 
force  means  annihilation. 

“The  force  which  woman  represents  is  not 
that  of  arms  or  of  physical  combat,  but  rather  the 
force  of  love,  of  spiritual  power;  either  we  try 
to  work  out  a  new  society  based  on  love,  or  we 
destroy  each  other  from  the  face  of  the  earth.” 

How  literally  true  that  has  been  and  is.  It  is 
literally  true  that  the  great  difference  in  the  re¬ 
sponsibilities  of  men  and  women  during  all  the 
past  ages,  has  been  that  the  burden  of  conflict, 
the  duty  of  the  soldier,  the  responsibility  of  de¬ 
fense  or  attack,  has  been  on  the  shoulders  of  the 

49 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

men :  that  of  cooperation  and  conservation,  on 
women. 

Whatever  difference  there  has  been  in  the  civi¬ 
lization  of  one  race  or  another,  in  their  religion, 
their  politics,  their  social  ideal,  their  economics, 
everything  else  that  you  like,  this  broad  and 
fundamental  distinction  has  always  persisted  be¬ 
tween  the  sexes.  The  men  have  done  the  duty  of 
the  soldier.  There  are,  here  and  there,  startling 
exceptions,  like  the  regiment  of  women  that  was 
raised  in  Russia  just  before  the  revolution. 
There  has  been,  here  and  there,  a  fighting  saint, 
like  Joan  of  Arc.  But  throughout  the  ages,  with¬ 
out  any  exception  that  counts  at  all,  and  in  civi¬ 
lizations  the  most  various,  this  broad  distinction 
has  always  persisted;  the  man  has  been  the  de¬ 
fender  and  the  fighter,  the  woman  has  made  the 
home.  And  it  has  not  yet  been  realized — outside 
the  narrowest  circles  of  scientific  study — how  com¬ 
pletely  that  which  is  spiritual  in  the  human  race 
has  depended  upon  the  creation  of  the  home. 

It  is  a  paradox,  is  it  not,  that  the  human  race 
should  owe  its  supremacy  over  the  lower  animals 
and  its  proud  position  in  the  world  of  created 

50 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


beings  really  and  honestly  to  the  helplessness  of 
its  children.  It  is  because  the  human  baby  is  so 
absolutely  helpless  for  so  long  a  time  that  Hu¬ 
manity  has  learned  to  cooperate,  to  practise  the 
virtues  of  altruism,  to  learn  the  meaning  of  love, 
to  spiritualize  itself.  Indeed  it  owes  to  that 
simple  physical  fact,  humanly  speaking,  all  that 
which  differentiates  it  from  the  brute. 

“Love  came  down  at  Christmas.”  That  is  one 
way  of  putting  the  fact  that  all  altruistic  love  is 
born,  begins,  with  the  love  of  a  mother  for  a 
child.  You  see,  a  human  baby  is  so  very  help¬ 
less  !  There  is  not  one  single  thing  that  it  can  do 
for  itself.  When  a  baby  comes  into  the  world, 
well,  it  can  shriek — it  starts  doing  that  at  once— 
but  that  is  all  it  can  do.  I  suppose,  really,  to  the 
scientific  eye,  it  is  not  even  an  extraordinarily 
attractive  object;  many  of  us  wonder  sometimes 
how  if  our  mothers  had  not  believed  that  we  were 
prodigies  we  should  have  got  a  chance  of  grow¬ 
ing  up  at  all !  It  is  the  surrender  of  the  strength 
of  the  older  generation  to  the  absolute  helpless¬ 
ness,  the  prolonged  helplessness,  of  human  in¬ 
fancy  that  has  created  the  spiritual  value  of 

51 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

human  love.  It  was  born  because  human  babies 
are  helpless. 

When  a  mother  is  carrying  her  child,  before 
it  is  born,  everything  that  she  receives  in  the 
way  of  nourishment  goes  first  to  that  child. 
When  it  has  received  all  that  it  wants,  she  can 
have  what  is  left  over,  but  everything  goes  first 
to  the  child.  Over  and  over  again,  people  in 
very  poor  and  even  famine-stricken  districts  in 
Europe,  since  the  war,  have  been  struck  with  the 
fact  that  a  woman  may  herself  bear  all  the  signs 
of  underfeeding,  almost  to  the  point  of  starva¬ 
tion,  and  yet  bear  a  healthy  child.  Of  course, 
the  process  may  go  too  far ;  there  may  not  be 
enough  even  to  keep  the  child  in  being;  but  you 
can,  again  and  again,  see  a  child  born  quite 
healthy,  quite  plump,  quite  viable,  quite  fit  for 
life,  from  a  mother  who  is  obviously  underfed. 
The  reason  is  that,  no  matter  what  she  receives, 
the  nourishment  goes  first  to  that  child. 

Is  not  that  a  parable  of  motherhood?  That 
all  the  rights  of  the  stronger  are  subservient  to 
the  rights  of  the  weaker?  That  all  a  mother  re¬ 
ceives  goes  first  to  make  that  which  is  being 

52 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


created  out  of  her  flesh  and  blood  ?  It  is  an  un¬ 
conscious  process,  not  subject  to  the  will,  and  yet 
it  has  often  seemed  to  me  one  of  the  loveliest 
facts  about  motherhood — this  unconscious  giving 
all  the  time,  this  unconscious  putting  first  of  the 
life  that  is  to  come.  And  when  the  child  is  born, 
it  has  not  a  single  right  that  it  can  enforce,  not 
one ;  yet  in  almost  any  home  that  you  like  to 
think  of,  it  is  the  baby  who  is  sovereign  over 
the  household,  the  baby  to  whose  rights  every¬ 
thing  else  has  to  give  way.  Nothing  surprises  a 
child  more,  as  it  begins  to  grow  up,  than  the 
startling  discovery  that  there  are  other  rights  in 
the  world  than  its  own!  That  is  inevitable  be¬ 
cause  at  the  first,  and  as  long  as  it  is  helpless, 
everything  gives  way  to  the  child’s  good. 

Out  of  that  altruistic  love,  which  seems  so 
idealistic  and  so  impossible,  and  yet  which  is 
seen  every  day  and  every  hour  so  that  nobody 
thinks  anything  of  it,  Humanity,  as  higher  than 
the  brute,  was  born.  For  it  is  the  genesis  of 
spiritual  love  which  has  made  Humanity  in  the 
image  of  God,  and  which,  in  fact,  is  responsible 

53 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

in  Humanity  for  all  that  raises  it  from  the  lower 
creation. 

Because  of  the  child  there  comes  into  the  home 
the  necessary  element  of  permanency ;  there 
arises  the  love  of  the  father,  who  is  himself  only 
a  step  away,  so  to  speak,  from  that  most  intimate 
tie  of  mother  and  child.  He  realizes  that  be¬ 
cause  the  child  is  helpless,  the  woman  must  devote 
herself  to  it,  and,  therefore,  he  must  defend  and 
protect  and  support  the  home.  So  we  get  that 
lovely  trinity  of  father,  mother  and  child,  whose 
beauty  arises  from  the  surrender  of  strength  to 
weakness. 

The  young  of  any  animal  are  fit  in  quite  a  little 
while  to  look  after  themselves.  The  lower  they 
are  in  the  scale  of  being,  the  more  quickly  are 
they  ready  for  the  battle  of  life.  But  the  human 
child  takes  not  days  and  weeks  or  months,  but 
years  to  grow  into  maturity  and,  therefore,  the 
link  between  the  father  and  mother  persists  and 
must  cease  to  be  a  merely  physical  attraction,  as 
between  the  lower  animals,  must  have  in  it  that 
which  is  spiritual,  because  it  is  compelled,  for 
the  child’s  sake,  to  be  permanent.  The  father 

54 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


ceases  to  be  merely  the  fighter  and  defender  of 
the  race ;  the  mother  ceases  to  be  merely  the  re¬ 
producer  of  the  race ;  and  the  two  together  pro¬ 
vide  that  spiritual  environment  for  the  child, 
without  which  the  child  is  not  really  happy. 

All  women  know  that  a  child  has  not  got  all 
it  needs  when  it  has  food  and  clothing  and  a 
roof  over  its  head.  You  know  that  a  child  does 
not  flourish,  generally  speaking,  in  an  institution, 
however  well  run,  as  it  does  in  a  home.  The 
mother  of  the  child  may  not  be  so  well  trained, 
may  not  have  so  good  an  education  as  the  head 
of  the  institution ;  but  there  is  some  power 
within  her  to  do  that  for  her  child  which  the 
head  of  an  institution  can  hardly  do.  And  this  is 
simply  the  power  of  love. 

I  remember,  when  I  was  looking  for  a  baby  to 
adopt,  I  went  down  to  a  nursing  home  run  by  a 
friend  of  mine  who  is  a  doctor,  to  see  a  baby 
that  had  been  born  there,  whose  mother  died  at 
its  birth.  It  was  such  a  pathetic  little  specimen, 
very  thin  and  miserable,  and  looking  almost  as 
if  it  could  not  live. 

I  was  feeling  very  ignorant  about  bringing  up 

55 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

babies,  and  I  asked,  “Is  there  anything  really 
wrong  with  the  child?”  The  doctor  looked  at 
me,  rather  amused,  and  said,  “There  is  nothing 
wrong  with  it,  it  only  wants  somebody  to  love 
it!”  Here  was  a  child  in  a  beautiful  nursing 
home,  looked  after  by  a  woman-doctor  of  great 
skill  and  experience,  with  any  number  of  trained 
nurses  to  look  after  it,  and  it  could  not  flourish 
because  it  wanted  somebody  to  love  it ! 

It  is  not  enough  to  give  a  child  the  material 
things  that  will  build  up  its  body;  it  must  have 
that  spiritual  environment  which  meets  the  needs 
of  its  immortal  spirit.  Out  of  these  needs  of  the 
helpless  human  child  has  grown  up  that  Hu¬ 
manity  of  which  we  may  dare  to  say  that  it  was 
made  in  the  image  and  likeness  of  God. 

All  the  crafts  and  arts  of  civilization  have 
been  born  in  the  home,  out  of  the  need  to  pro¬ 
vide  the  child  with  the  right  kind  of  surround¬ 
ings  ;  weaving  and  dyeing  and  the  making  of 
clothes  and  the  making  of  food;  almost  every 
art  and  craft  which  to-day  is  carried  on,  perhaps 
in  great  factories  and  by  the  hands  of  men,  was 
started  in  the  home.  That  is  a  literal  fact.  It 

56 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


was  to  surround  the  child  with  the  right  kind  of 
answer  to  its  demands  that  civilization  grew  up ; 
that  we  learned  to  be  orderly  and  loving  and 
unselfish ;  that  we  have  decorated  our  homes  with 
what  we  believe  to  be  beautiful ;  that  we  have 
created  with  our  hands  the  crafts  and  the  arts 
of  civilization.  All  that  which  makes  us  human, 
all  that  which  dififerentiates  us  from  the  brute, 
has  been  created  out  of  the  need  of  the  human 
being  for  a  home. 

Now  this  is  a  universal  law.  And  science 
has  taught  us  that  if  a  certain  power  operates 
in  a  certain  way  in  one  place,  it  will  always 
operate  in  that  way — always.  You  remember  the 
old  story  of  James  Watt,  sitting  by  his  mother’s 
hearth  and  watching  the  steam  lift  the  lid  of  the 
kettle.  He  realized  that  it  did  so  because  when 
water  is  turned  into  steam  it  expands.  I  suppose 
that  all  the  women  in  the  world  have  watched 
kettles  boiling  on  the  hearth,  and  in  northern 
countries  the  singing  of  the  kettle  is  the  very 
symbol  and  expression  of  all  that  is  homely  and 
dear.  Millions  and  millions  of  women,  genera¬ 
tion  after  generation,  had  watched  their  kettles, 

57 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

had  seen  the  steam  lifting  the  lid;  and  they 
waited  until  a  young  man  came  and  told  them 
what  the  significance  of  that  movement  was ! 
This  boy  (he  was  only  a  boy)  sat  there  and 
watched  until,  I  believe,  his  mother  boxed  his 
ears;  she  was  so  impatient  with  him,  watching 
the  steam  rising  from  the  kettle ! 

Women  had  not  realized  that  there,  in  their 
own  homes,  before  their  very  eyes,  was  operating 
a  power  which  would  drive  the  ships  of  the  world 
across  the  sea  and  give  the  needed  power  to  our 
great  modern  machinery  which  would  so  increase 
material  wealth  that  it  would  develop  an  en¬ 
tirely  new  order  of  society.  They  did  not  under¬ 
stand  that,  by  a  universal  law,  the  steam  that  is 
in  the  kettle  on  the  hearth  will  operate  in  the  same 
way  when  it  is  in  the  boilers  of  the  Majestic  or 
the  Aquitania,  or  in  great  power  machines  in 
factories  and  mills. 

In  the  same  way,  every  woman,  since  the  world 
began,  has  watched  love  creating  Humanity. 
Every  woman  in  her  home  has  realized  that  it  is 
by  the  power  of  love  that  children  are  able  to 
grow  into  human  beings.  They  know  it  so  well 

58 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


that  they  regard  a  home  which  rests  on  anything 
but  love  as  a  failure. 

Children  may  be  governed  by  coercion,  they 
may  be  governed  by  fear  or  the  power  of  the 
purse,  but  everybody  knows  that  in  so  far  as 
that  is  true,  the  home  of  those  children  is  a 
failure,  and  that  you  get  the  best  human  being, 
the  best  human  results,  in  a  home  which  is  gov¬ 
erned  by  love.  We  have  all  known  that  since 
the  world  began.  Are  we  to  wait  until  some  man 
comes  to  tell  us  that  the  same  power  can  run  the 
world?  Or  shall  we  ourselves,  this  time,  gen¬ 
eralize  a  great  spiritual  law  and  proclaim  that, 
as  love  in  the  home  has  made  Humanity,  so  love 
in  the  world  will  operate  in  exactly  the  same  way  ? 
That  you  cannot  really  think  of  a  home  or  a 
nation  or  a  city  as  a  success  unless  and  until  it 
is  based  upon  and  governed  by  love?  Can  we 
not  proclaim  to  the  world  (before  some  man 
comes  to  teach  it  to  us!)  that  each  little  home  is 
made  by  a  power  that  can  make  a  nation  or  the 
world?  That  this  power  which  we  have  seen 
with  our  eyes  must  operate  in  the  same  way 
wherever  Humanity  is  gathered  together? 

59 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

It  is  not  possible,  I  think,  for  us  to  resist  the 
conclusion  put  before  us  in  the  extract  with 
which  I  began :  that  the  world  cannot  any  longer 
pause  to  choose  between  conflict  and  cooperation, 
if  it  desires  to  survive  at  all.  But  what  women 
can  do  especially  is  (from  our  own  observation 
and  our  own  experience,  going  back  through  all 
the  ages  since  the  beginning  of  Man)  to  show 
what  the  scientist  shows  in  his  experiment  in 
his  laboratory,  the  way  in  which  the  spiritual 
law  works.  We  have  to  bring  about  the  delivery 
of  a  nobler  Humanity.  Once  more,  Humanity  is 
in  the  throes  of  birth. 

It  has  been  said  that  we  stand  to-day  between 
two  worlds,  one  dead,  one  powerless  to  be  born. 
Powerless  to  be  born !  I  have  seen  babies  some¬ 
times  (I  worked  in  a  maternity  hospital  during 
some  part  of  the  war)  “powerless  to  be  born,” 
who  were  indeed  delivered  into  the  world  and 
who  lived  only  through  the  sacrifice  of  the 
mother.  Again  and  again  I  have  seen  a  woman, 
uneducated,  with  no  great  spiritual  opportunity 
one  would  have  thought,  come  into  that  hospital 
to  bear  her  child,  whose  sole  desire — a  desire  so 

60 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


single-minded  and  single-hearted  that  it  left  in 
her  no  other  desire  at  all — was  that  her  baby 
should  be  born  well  and  strong. 

I  did  not  know,  until  I  went  into  that  hospital, 
how  very  much  depends,  even  in  these  days  of 
modern  science,  on  the  intelligence,  the  courage 
and  the  fortitude  of  the  mother.  And  how  very 
rarely  did  it  fail!  How  very  rarely  did  you  see 
a  woman  who  thought  of  anything  at  all,  in  that 
moment  of  anguish  and  travail,  but  that  her  child 
should  be  born  whole  and  well!  It  is  for  such 
an  hour  that  we  are  come  into  the  kingdom — 
for  the  birth-hour  of  a  new  Humanity. 

Men  have  given  to  the  women  of  to-day  and, 
above  all,  to  the  women  of  this  country,  a  power, 
a  freedom,  a  responsibility,  greater  than  at  any 
other  time  or  in  any  other  country  in  the  world. 
It  is  of  you  women  that  we  may  say,  “Thou  art 
come  into  the  kingdom  for  such  a  time  as  this.” 

There  are,  in  the  history  of  the  world,  again 
and  again,  dramatic  moments,  when  a  great  and 
swift  development  becomes  possible.  We  are 
always  going  forward  or  backward,  it  is  true. 
But  there  are  times  when  the  movement  forward 

61 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

or  backward  becomes  dramatic,  catastrophic, 
extraordinary ;  w  hen,  looking  back  on  the  history 
of  the  world,  we  can  see  that  an  epoch  was 
made.  The  coming  of  our  Lord  Christ  was 
such  an  epoch  supremely,  of  course,  but  other 
great  episodes  in  the  world’s  history  have  meant 
also  definite  and  striking  advance. 

I  am  persuaded  that  at  this  moment  it  is  ab¬ 
solutely  essential  that  there  shall  be  born  into  the 
world  a  nobler,  a  greater  and  a  more  powerful 
Humanity.  You  women  have  in  your  hands  the 
children  of  the  world.  They  have  always  been 
in  the  women’s  hands ;  the  infancy  of  Humanity 
is  yours  to  train.  But  in  a  wider  sense,  also  a 
more  significant  and  fundamental  sense,  this  is 
true:  Humanity  itself  is  in  your  hands,  and 
now  when  we  are  confronted  with  an  intellectual 
advance  which  is  stupendous,  with  powers  for 
good  and  evil  which,  on  the  one  hand,  can  heap 
up  wealth  like  mountains  and,  on  the  other, 
destroy  it  until  the  face  of  the  earth  is  blasted 
with  the  broken  and  the  dead,  it  is  necessary  that 
there  be  born  a  generation  which  shall  have  a 

62 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


spiritual  power  equal  to  the  intellectual  and  mate¬ 
rial  advance  that  has  been  made. 

It  is  the  hour  when  women  must,  once  more, 
and  this  time  consciously  and  deliberately,  create 
that  atmosphere  both  in  the  home  and  the  world 
wherein  that  which  makes  us  human,  that  which 
is  spiritual,  that  which  is  civilized,  shall  be  im¬ 
measurably  more  developed  than  it  has  been  in 
the  past. 

Let  me  show  you  quite  definitely  what  I  mean. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  Young  Women’s  Chris¬ 
tian  Association  as  typical  of  the  great  organiza¬ 
tions  through  which  you  as  women  are  endeavor¬ 
ing  to  make  your  contribution  toward  social 
progress.  Here  are  you  women  in  this,  the 
biggest  association  of  its  kind  in  the  world,  with 
an  organization  so  vast  that  it  almost  staggers 
imagination ;  having  to  deal  with  cleavages  in 
your  social  system  so  deep  that  to  the  outsider 
America  seems  to  be  characteristically  the  land 
of  multimillionaires,  and  yet,  on  the  other  hand, 
contains  poverty  as  extreme  as  in  any  of  the 
older  countries — with  racial  cleavages  deeper 
still. 


63 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

For  leaders  you  will  have  to  develop  a  type  of 
woman  whose  imagination  and  insight  and  spirit¬ 
ual  vision  is  so  great  that,  though  she  be  at  the 
head  of  a  great  organization,  she  must  be  able 
to  understand  the  needs  of  the  rank  and  file  of 
girls  at  the  other  side  of  the  United  States,  living 
in  circumstances  utterly  different  from  her  own, 
with  needs  quite  different,  younger  in  years, 
perhaps  a  different  social  class,  or  of  a  different 
race.  She  must  understand  the  needs  of  women 
all  over  the  country,  enter  into  their  position, 
understand  them.  If  she  cannot  do  that,  she  is 
unequal  to  the  vast  responsibility  she  bears.  Who 
is  sufficient  for  these  things? 

They  demand  something  more  than  intelli¬ 
gence  ;  they  demand  spiritual  vision,  the  power  to 
see  what  is  not  visible  to  the  eye,  to  reach  with 
sympathetic  understanding  across  the  three  thou¬ 
sand  miles  of  your  great  country,  itself  almost 
a  continent.  They  demand  a  power  to  control 
the  details  of  the  use  of  time,  to  be  always  busy 
and  never  distracted,  employed  continually  yet  at 
leisure  in  the  heart.  They  demand  a  spiritual 

64 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


discipline  and  insight  which  any  woman  might 
dread  to  claim. 

You  must  also  produce  that  kind  of  leadership 
in  your  rank  and  file.  You  will  have  to  have 
students  who  not  only  desire  to  know  but  who 
are  capable  of  knowing  what  it  means  to  be  an 
industrial  girl.  You  will  have  to  have  industrial 
girls  who  not  only  desire  to  express  but  who  are 
capable  of  expressing  their  point  of  view  so  that 
it  shall  be  understood,  without  resentment,  with¬ 
out  harshness,  without  prejudices,  without  bitter¬ 
ness,  yet  with  passion  and  with  power  so  that 
the  world  is  moved  to  better  things.  Your  older 
members  must  be  able  to  understand  young 
women  and  your  younger  members  must  know 
how  to  use  the  experience  of  older  women. 
Women  in  business  life  will  have  to  meet  sym¬ 
pathetically  the  problems  of  women  in  the  home, 
and  differing  races  will  bring  their  unique  contri¬ 
bution  and  receive  each  from  the  other. 

Who  is  sufficient  for  these  things?  Yet  the 
very  vastness  of  the  problems  before  you  de¬ 
mands  them  and  unless  you  can  produce  that  type 
of  leader  and  that  type  in  the  rank  and  file,  you 

65 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

will  be  crushed  by  the  very  immensity  of  the 
task. 

That  which  is  true  of  you  here  is  even  more 
true  in  its  way  of  the  world  itself.  Science  has 
given  us  power  and  sight  and  faith.  Science  has 
given  to  the  service  of  Humanity  instruments  by 
which  it  may  see  the  stars  to  which  our  fore¬ 
fathers  were  blind.  Where  they  saw  three  thou¬ 
sand  stars  in  the  heavens,  we  count  three  millions. 
Science  has  enabled  us  to  peer  into  the  structure 
of  the  atom  and  to  reason  about  things  we  can 
neither  see  nor  imagine.  In  other  words,  science 
has  increased  our  sight  so  that  we  can  measure 
immeasurable  space  and  use  the  things  that  are 
invisible. 

Can  you  do  that  spiritually?  You  can  see 
some  star  countless  billions  of  miles  away.  Can 
you  see  a  child  in  the  slums  of  New  York  who 
starves?  Can  you  see  the  people  of  Russia  who 
die,  thirty  or  thirty-five  millions  of  them?  Is 
that  visible  to  you  ?  Is  there  any  spiritual  instru¬ 
ment  by  which  you  can  be  made  to  see  things 
like  that?  You  can  live  in  the  wealthy  parts  of 
your  cities,  many  of  you ;  you  can  shut  out  from 

66 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


your  physical  sight  those  who  are  poor  and  who 
are  spiritually  as  well  as  physically  underfed. 
But  you  must  create  a  Humanity  whose  under¬ 
standing  and  pity  the  mere  walls  of  a  house,  the 
mere  distance  of  a  city,  or  the  distance  of  half 
a  world  cannot  baffle,  to  whom  it  shall  be  intoler¬ 
able  that  any  human  being  should  suffer  without 
help. 

We  have  already  created  a  Humanity  which 
cannot  endure  to  see  a  child  starve  before  its 
eyes.  You  do  not  think  that  it  is  a  great  virtue 
to  say  of  a  man  that  he  could  not  live  comfort¬ 
ably  in  a  house  with  his  family  and  have  there 
a  child  dying  from  starvation!  You  would 
rather  say  that  if  he  could,  he  would  be  a  monster. 
You  would  say  that  he  could  not  be  human,  for 
no  human  being  could  suffer  the  sight  of  a  child 
literally  starving  before  his  eyes. 

But  we  must  go  further  since  we  have  created 
a  world  in  which  we  cannot  do  a  cruel  thing  in 
one  place  without  its  reverberating  across  the 
world.  We  must  have  a  spiritual  imagination 
which  will  make  it  impossible  for  us  to  be  cruel 
merely  because  with  our  physical  eyes  we  cannot 

67 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

see  the  effect  of  what  we  do.  It  must  be  as  im¬ 
possible  for  the  Humanity  of  the  future  to  live 
comfortably  and  happily  on  Fifth  Avenue  in  New 
York  while  there  are  people  on  the  East  Side  who 
starve,  as  it  is  even  more  impossible  for  a  man  to 
see  a  child  starve  before  his  eyes. 

Not  long  ago,  I  was  put  up  for  a  night  by  one 
of  the  kindest  of  hostesses  in  my  own  country. 
Nothing  could  have  been  more  considerate  than 
the  way  in  which  she  treated  me.  But  when  I 
asked  her  if  she  was  going  to  Dr.  Nansen’s  meet¬ 
ing  about  the  Russian  Famine  Fund  the  next 
week,  she  said :  “I  don’t  see  the  use  of  that.  I 
think  it  would  be  much  better  to  let  them  all 
starve!”  Yet  she  was  not  an  unkind  woman. 
She  would  have  done  anything  in  the  world  for 
an  individual  suffering  child  in  her  own  house. 
But  she  could  not  imagine  thirty  millions  of 
people  in  such  agony.  They  were  too  far  away ; 
she  could  not  realize  them,  and  she  herself  had 
never  known  what  it  was  to  be  without  food. 

I  often  think  that  when  Dr.  Nansen  appealed 
before  the  bar  of  the  League  of  Nations  for  five 
million  pounds  from  all  the  world — that  little 

68 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


sum  for  Russia ! — if  he  had  been  confronted  not 
by  the  great  and  the  mighty,  but  by  the  poor,  he 
would  not  have  gone  empty  away.  People  who 
understand  what  it  is  to  be  hungry  cannot  en¬ 
dure  that  others  should  be  hungry.  But  can  we 
not  develop  a  Humanity  which,  zmthout  that 
experience,  has  such  spiritual  vision  that  the  pain 
of  everyone  is  present  to  itself ;  that  a  man  can¬ 
not,  literally  cannot  be  happy  as  long  as  other 
people  are  starved  and  stunted  ? 

You  must  produce  that  Humanity  in  your 
homes,  or  else  the  world  will  perish  under  the 
weight  of  its  own  intellectual  and  material  great¬ 
ness.  We  have  learned  how  to  send  our  trade 
across  the  world.  We  have  created  a  civiliza¬ 
tion  so  complex  that  one  of  your  magnates  in 
New  York  can  shake  the  financial  markets 
throughout  the  world.  We  have  created  a  world 
such  that  disease  and  health  are  mingled  up  and 
knit  together  across  the  continents ;  that  no  one 
can  prosper  without  helping  others  to  prosper, 
and  no  one  can  suffer  without  causing  others 
to  suffer. 

If  we  have  made  that  world,  as  by  our  intel- 

69 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 

lectual  advance  we  have  done,  we  must  create  that 
spiritual  power  which  will  make  us  as  spiritually 
sensitive  as  we  are  intellectually  efficient;  which 
will  enable  us  to  visualize,  to  understand  and  to 
hope  for  all  the  world. 

Science,  I  said,  has  given  us  faith,  and  that 
may  seem  to  some  of  you  a  very  strange  claim. 
But  is  it  not  true  that  the  scientist  does  not  doubt 
his  ultimate  power  to  deal  with  any  problem — 
material  problem — that  faces  him?  There  is 
something  magnificent  about  the  attitude  of  the 
modern  scientist  in  the  face  of  any  problem,  in 
his  conviction  that  ultimately  it  will  be  solved. 
Cannot  those  who  care  for  the  things  of  the 
spirit  have  the  same  faith  in  Humanity,  the  same 
boundless  conviction  of  ultimate  triumph,  the 
same  certainty  that  we  shall  make  out  of  all  our 
opportunities  something  glorious?  The  march 
of  the  spirit  must  equal  the  march  of  the  intellect, 
or  we  perish. 

Can  such  a  generation  as  I  described — for  it 
means  nothing  less  than  a  new  Humanity — be 
born  of  the  women  of  to-day?  Is  it  possible  that 
out  of  the  intimate  knowledge  of  their  own  ex- 

70 


Woman’s  Service  to  the  Race 


perience  of  the  power  there  is  in  the  world  to 
civilize,  to  redeem,  to  ennoble,  by  Love,  there 
may  be  given  to  us  a  new  and  nobler  and  more 
civilized  Humanity,  able  nobly  and  rightly  to 
deal  with  the  problems  created  by  an  older  civi¬ 
lization?  God  grant  it! 


71 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 


“One  of  his  disciples  said  unto  him /  Lord,  teach 
us  to  pray.  And  he  said  unto  them,  When  ye 
pray,  say,  Father  ” 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology. 


At  first  sight,  when  one  begins  to  study  theol¬ 
ogy,  it  does  not  seem  as  though  there  were  any 
particular  point  of  view  or  any  particular  con¬ 
tribution  into  which  sex  enters  at  all.  One  of 
the  very  few  things  that  our  Lord  says  about  sex 
suggests  that  it  is  not  an  eternal  and,  therefore, 
not  a  fundamental  thing,  that  there  is  no  sex  in 
the  spirit.  When  He  was  asked  a  question  ob¬ 
viously  designed  to  entrap  Him,  about  a  woman 
who  had  married  a  succession  of  brothers,  He 
said,  “In  heaven  they  neither  marry  nor  are 
given  in  marriage,  but  are  as  the  angels  of 
heaven.”  That  assurance  that  in  the  spirit  there 
is  no  sex,  is,  I  think,  for  women  one  of  the  most 
glorious  and  significant  things  in  the  whole  of 
Christ’s  teachings. 

In  all  the  other  great  religions  of  the  world — 
some  of  them  very  spiritual  and  very  lofty — there 

75 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

is  some  special  teaching  about  the  nature,  the  duty 
and  the  ideals  of  women.  Sometimes  it  is  very 
beautiful  teaching;  sometimes  it  is  very  poor 
and  narrow.  But  I  believe  I  am  right  in  saying 
that  in  all  the  great  religions  of  the  world,  there 
is  special  teaching  about  women  as  distinct  from 
men,  except  in  the  religion  of  Christ.  In  the 
Christian  religion— that  is  to  say,  in  Christ’s  reli¬ 
gion,  which  is  not  invariably  the  same  thing! — 
in  Christ’s  religion  there  is  no  teaching  at  all  that 
is  especially  designed  for  women. 

If  I  were  to  take  our  Lord’s  words  out  of  their 
context  in  the  gospels  and  repeat  them  to  any 
person  who  had  never  read  the  gospels,  that 
person  could  not  tell  whether  any  given  sentence 
was  addressed  to  a  woman  or  a  man.  If  you 
leave  out  the  actual  words  of  address,  there  is 
absolutely  nothing  in  the  essential  character  of 
any  passage  in  our  Lord’s  teaching  which  belongs 
to  one  sex  more  than  to  another.  There  is  not  a 
trace  of  intellectual  condescension.  There  is  not 
a  suggestion  that  women  have  a  narrower  sphere 
or  a  different  ideal  from  that  of  men.  There  is 
no  list  of  virtues  which  women  are  especially  to 

76 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

aim  at  as  distinct  from  that  list  of  virtues  which 
is  offered  to  men. 

In  a  great  deal  of  modern  religious  teaching, 
we  are  told,  for  instance,  that  women  should  be 
chaste  and  men  should  be  brave;  that  women 
should  be  gentle  and  men  should  be  strong;  that 
women  should  be  submissive  (which  is  a  very 
convenient  doctrine  for  men)  and  men  should 
be  independent.  There  is  an  admirable  little 
double  list  of  virtues  for  men  and  women  which 
has  often  struck  me  as  singularly  resembling 
the  double  list  of  virtues  for  rich  and  poor. 
Patience,  unselfishness,  humility,  resignation, — 
these  are  the  virtues  commended  to  the  favorable 
consideration  of  the  poor;  and  these  are,  on  the 
whole,  the  virtues  which  have  been  commended  to 
the  consideration  of  our  sex.  But  in  that  distinc¬ 
tion  of  class  or  sex,  there  is  no  authority  to  be  de¬ 
rived  from  Christ. 

In  his  teachings,  there  is  not  a  word,  not  a 
phrase,  which  is  especially  adapted  to  one  sex 
rather  than  the  other.  •  I  do  not  believe  that  we 
have  yet  sufficiently  grasped  the  profound  signifi¬ 
cance  of  that.  Our  Lord  is  the  ideal  not  of  one 

77 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

sex  or  another,  not  of  one  class  or  another,  but 
of  all  Humanity,  and  I  often  think  that  that 
rather  effeminate  presentation  of  our  Lord  which 
tradition  has  created,  has  a  reason  which  explains 
its  weakness.  One  does  feel,  I  think,  that  there 
is  very  often  in  that  traditional  representation 
something  a  little  effeminate.  One  feels  that  a 
stronger  character  should  be  depicted  than  that 
which  is  suggested  by  the  popular  pictures  of 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  especially  in  modern  art.  Yet 
I  believe  that  the  artist  has  only  failed  to  do  what 
was  in  itself  a  right  thing  to  aim  at.  He  has 
been  trying  to  express  the  fact  that  though  Jesus 
of  Nazareth  was  born  a  man  (since  He  had  to  be 
born  in  the  body  either  of  a  man  or  a  woman)  yet 
He  is,  in  fact,  the  ideal  of  all  Humanity;  for 
women  as  well  as  for  men  the  Way,  the  Truth 
and  the  Life;  and  that  from  no  virtue  that  He 
lived  or  preached,  of  strength  or  gentleness,  of 
power  or  purity,  can  either  sex  dispense  itself 
without  breaking  the  whole  ideal. 

So — to  be  personal  for  a  moment — when  I  first 
began  to  preach,  I  felt  very  strongly  that  people 
ought  not  to  treat  sex  as  though  it  were  of 

78 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

eternal  significance ;  that  the  things  of  the  spirit 
should  be  proclaimed  by  men  and  women  alike; 
that  if  God  gave  a  message  to  any  human  being, 
she  should  not  be  forbidden  to  deliver  it,  because 
she  was  a  woman.  That  I  still  deeply  and 
passionately  feel. 

But  I  have  also  learned  that  there  is,  notwith¬ 
standing,  a  certain  point  of  view  which  will 
enable  women  to  give  to  the  world  not  only  in 
practical  service  but  in  theology — in  the  world’s 

idea  of  God  Himself — some  fresh  understand- 

«• 

ing,  some  new  light.  After  all,  it  does  matter  in 
what  kind  of  body  your  spirit  is  enshrined.  The 
point  of  view  (as  I  have  said  already)  of  India, 
of  China,  of  Africa  and  of  America  has  a  cer¬ 
tain  difference,  and  we  all  feel — those  of  us  who 
think  of  it  at  all — that  our  understanding  of 
Christ  and  of  God  is  not  complete  until  every 
race  has  brought  its  peculiar  spiritual  genius,  and 
its  special  spiritual  experience,  to  the  understand¬ 
ing  of  our  great  and  universal  religion. 

In  the  same  way,  I  have  become  convinced 
that  from  their  actual  experience,  from  the  fact 
that  to  be  a  woman  gives  one  a  rather  different 

79 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

angle  of  vision  to  certain  things  in  life,  some¬ 
thing  can  be  given  even  to  our  conception  of  God 
Himself,  some  new  understanding  of  the  great 
teaching  of  Christ,  when  women  begin  to  take 
their  full  share  in  thinking  out  their  faith. 

Women  have  always  been  among  the  great 
saints,  the  great  servants  of  Humanity,  the 
practical  Christians ;  but,  on  the  whole,  the  theol¬ 
ogy  of  the  world  is  the  work  of  men.  There  have 
been  a  few  great  women  theologians,  a  Catherine 
of  Siena,  a  Teresa  of  Spain,  but  these  women 
have  always  been  the  exceptional  women,  the 
women  whose  experience,  so  far  as  that  is  pos¬ 
sible,  has  rather  been  like  the  experience  of  a 
man  than  the  experience  of  the  normal  woman. 
That  is  to  say,  they  have  not  been  wives  and 
mothers,  and  though  motherhood  has  been  in 
them  expressed  spiritually  their  contribution  to 
theology  has-*  been  rather  more  like  that  of  a 
great  man,  in  some  respects,  than  representative 
of  the  experience  of  the  normal,  average — I  use 
the  word  in  its  best  sense — woman’s  life.  It  is 
this  particular  contribution  to  theology,  not  that 
of  the  exceptional  woman,  but  that  of  the  woman 

80 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

whose  life  is  preeminently  that  of  her  sex,  that 
I  believe  is  going  to  add  such  wealth  of  under¬ 
standing  to  the  theology  of  this  generation. 

The  gospel  of  St.  Luke  is  believed  by  students 
of  the  Bible  to  owe  a  great  deal  to  some  woman 
or  some  group  of  women.  It  has  been  believed 
for  a  very  long  time,  for  example,  that  the  first 
two  or  three  chapters  of  the  gospel  must  have 
been  given  to  the  evangelist  by  our  Lord’s 
mother ;  they  so  obviously  represent  a  woman’s 
point  of  view,  and  are  expressed  in  a  way  which 
suggests  the  mind  of  a  mother.  Have  you 
noticed  one  most  intimate  little  touch,  which 
seems  to  me  so  maternal  and  so  like  a  woman  and 
really  not  very  like  a  man  (I  do  not  believe  St. 

Luke  could  have  thought  of  it  all  by  himself!), 
when  we  are  told  that  our  Lord  “increased  in 
wisdom  and  in  stature  and  in  favor  with  God 
and  man.”  Our  Lord’s  mother  knew  that  He 
was  growing  up  not  only  in  his  wonderful  mind 
but  in  his  lovely  little  human  body;  He  was 
growing  out  of  his  clothes,  I  suppose !  “In 
wisdom  and  in  stature  and  in  favor  with  God 
and  man.” 


81 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

It  is  now  believed  by  many  people  that  not 
only  these  first  chapters  but  a  very  large  part  of 
the  gospel  was  collected  by  St.  Luke  from  the 
records  and  memories  of  women.  Chapters  eight 
to  nineteen,  that  is,  eleven  chapters  right  in  the 
heart  of  the  gospel,  were  perhaps  given  to  him 
by  the  little  group  of  women  who  ministered  to 
our  Lord  as  He  went  about  teaching  and  preach¬ 
ing;  either  by  one  of  these  women,  possibly  our 
Lord’s  mother  again,  or  possibly  Joanna,  or  by 
the  little  group  of  women  together.  They  told 
St.  Luke,  who  was  collecting  from  various  people 
who  had  known  our  Lord  in  the  flesh,  the  teach¬ 
ing  that  they  remembered,  the  events  and  stories 
and  sayings  that  struck  them  most. 

You  will  realize,  I  think,  if  you  read  the  gospel 
again  from  that  point  of  view,  that  there  is  a 
certain  difference  in  the  way  in  which  a  woman 
interprets  and  remembers  the  teaching  of  Christ 
and  the  way  in  which  a  man  does.  It  was  Bernard 
Shaw  who  said,  “It  is  the  Christ  of  St.  Luke  Who 
has  conquered  the  world.”  Not  the  Christ  of  the 
fourth  gospel,  who,  I  always  think,  is  more 
wonderful  to  those  who  already  know  almost  by 
-  82 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

heart  the  first  three  gospels;  not  the  Christ  of 
St.  Matthew  or  of  St.  Mark,  preeminently;  but, 
above  all,  the  Christ  of  St.  Luke.  I  believe  that 
Bernard  Shaw  is  right  in  saying  that,  ani.  that 
the  reason  is  that  there  is  a  certain  humanity,  a 
certain  intimacy  of  touch  in  the  sayings  in  this 
gospel  which  is  hardly  found  in  the  same  perfec¬ 
tion  in  any  of  the  others. 

Christ,  to  the  mind  behind  St.  Luke,  was,  above 
all — no,  not  above  all,  but  at  least  equally — the 
human  Christ  and  the  divine  Christ ;  and  his 
divinity  expressed  itself  to  that  mind,  above  all, 
through  his  human  personality. 

You  will  notice  that  our  Lord  recognized  that 
difiference  in  his  teaching  between  women  and 
men.  I  have  said  that  He  gave  no  especial  teach¬ 
ing  for  women.  Well,  it  might  be  argued  that 
that  was  because  He  was  so  much  a  man  that 
He  forgot  women!  It  is  very  easy  for  men  to 
forget  that  women  exist  when  they  start  out  to 
teach  one  another;  they  think  in  terms  of  men, 
they  think  in  terms  of  boys.  And  it  might  be 
argued  that  if  our  Lord  gave  no  especial  teach¬ 
ing  for  women,  it  was  because  He  forgot  them 

83 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

altogether,  but  for  another  equally  striking 
quality  in  his  teaching,  that  is,  his  frequent  appeal 
.  to  women’s  experience. 

He  gave  to  both  men  and  women  the  same 
teaching,  but  He  enforced  it  by  applying  it  to 
their  different  lives.  He  made  it  so  real  to 
them  that  I  often  think  any  public  speaker  who 
studied  our  Lord’s  speaking  just  from  the  point 
of  view  of  a  speaker,  would  be  struck  by  the  per¬ 
fection  of  the  way  in  which  He  makes  his  appeal. 
He  looked  at  the  people  He  was  speaking  to  and 
saw,  perhaps,  some  shepherd  standing  there  (I 
suppose  He  taught  in  the  open  air  a  dozen  times 
for  once  in  the  synagogue),  and  He  said,  “The 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  like  unto  a  man  who  has 
a  hundred  sheep  and  one  is  lost,  and  he  leaveth 
the  ninety-nine  and  goeth  into  the  mountains 
and  seeketh  the  one  that  is  lost.”  Then  his  eyes 
fell  upon  a  woman  and  He  said,  “The  kingdom 
of  heaven  is  like  unto  a  woman  who  has  lost  a 
piece  of  silver  and  she  sweeps  her  house  until  she 
has  found  it.” 

Again  and  again  you  will  find  that  double 
appeal : 


84 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

“Two  men  shall  be  in  a  field,  one  is  taken,  and 
the  other  left.” 

“Two  women  shall  be  grinding  at  the  mill, 
one  is  taken  and  one  is  left.” 

Again :  “What  man  of  you,  having  a  hundred 
sheep,  and  having  lost  one  of  them,  doth  not 
leave  the  ninety  and  nine,  and  go  after  that 
which  is  lost?” 

“What  zvoman,  having  ten  pieces  of  silver,  if 
she  lose  one  piece  doth  not  light  a  lamp,  and  sweep 
the  house  and  seek  diligently  until  she  find  it?” 

Again :  “The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  like  unto  a 
grain  of  mustard  seed  which  a  man  took  and 
sowed  in  his  field.” 

“The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  like  unto  leaven 
which  a  woman  took  and  hid  in  three  measures 
of  meal.” 

Again:  “The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  as  a  man 
travelling  into .  a  far  country  zvho  called  his 
servants  and  delivered  unto  them  his  goods.” 

“Then  shall  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  be  likened 
unto  ten  virgins  who  took  their  lamps  and  went 
forth  to  meet  the  bridegroom.” 

Again :  “There  were  may  lepers  in  Israel  in 

85 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

the  time  of  Elisha  and  none  of  them  was  cleansed 
but  Naaman . ” 

“There  were  many  widows  in  Israel  in  the  time 
of  Elijah,  and  unto  none  of  them  was  he  sent 
but  to  Zarephath .” 

Again :  “The  men  of  Nineveh  shall  rise  up  in 
judgment  with  this  generation  and  shall  con¬ 
demn  it;  for  they  repented  at  the  preaching  of 
Jonah,  and  behold,  a  greater  than  Jonah  is  here.” 

“The  Queen  of  the  South  shall  rise  up  in 
judgment  with  the  men  of  this  generation  and 
shall  condemn  them;  for  she  came  from  the 
ends  of  the  earth  to  hear  the  wisdom  of  Solomon, 
and  behold  a  greater  than  Solomon  is  here.”* 

Christ  knew  that  the  woman  looks  for  her 
lost  property  in  her  house,  for  that  is  where  the 
Jewish  woman  was ;  but  the  man  has  lost  his 
sheep — he  goes  out  into  the  mountain  to  seek  for 
it.  There  is  a  consciousness  of  the  different  ex¬ 
perience  of  those  to  whom  He  appeals  that  makes 
one  realize  how  intensely  He  was  aware  of  all 
their  personal  lives  and  personal  experiences. 

*  These  instances  were  collected  by  E.  Picton-Turber- 
ville  in  her  book  “Christ  and  Woman’s  Power.” 

86 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

And  the  experience  of  the  average  man  and 
woman  is  different. 

When,  then,  you  come  to  the  gospel  of  St. 

Luke,  you  find  that  there  is  something  at  the  back 
of  much  of  it  that  suggests  a  woman’s  mind ;  and 
among  these  instances  is  the  passage  so  familiar 
that  I  suppose  most  of  you  know  it  nearly  by 
heart,  a  passage  of  which  it  has  been  said  that  if 
all  the  rest  of  the  gospels  were  lost  and  there  re¬ 
mained  to  us  only  the  story  of  the  Prodigal  Son, 
we  should  still  have  the  heart  of  the  teaching  of 
Christ. 

This  supremely  beautiful  parable,  which  to  all 
the  world  is  familiar,  which  moves  the  hearts  of 
men  all  over  the  world  and  in  all  the  ages,  is  only 
recorded  in  the  gospel  according  to  St.  Luke. 

Many  of  the  parables  are  recorded  three  times, 
most  of  them  perhaps  twice,  but  this  one  which  is 
the  supreme  parable,  of  all  our  Lord’s  teaching 
the  most  adorable,  this  one  has  only  been  recorded 
once,  and  it  comes  in  that  part  of  St.  Luke  which 
scholars  now  attribute  to  the  suggestion  and  the 
teaching  of  a  woman.  I  wonder  why  that  is ! 

87 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

One  would  have  thought  that  no  one  who  had 
ever  heard  it  could  forget  it. 

Our  Lord  put  his  teaching  into  these  little 
stories  that  we  call  parables,  because  He  was 
speaking  to  people  who  could  not  read  or  write, 
who  must  have  their  teaching  given  to  them  in 
such  a  form  that  they  could  easily  remember 
it.  Everyone  remembers  a  story,  so  our  Lord 
put  his  great  truths  in  these  lovely  little  stories, 
and  this  one,  which  is  the  loveliest  of  all,  was 
remembered  only  by  some  woman  or  some  group 
of  women  who  recorded  it  and  gave  it  to  St. 
Luke. 

Think  what  the  heart  of  that  parable  is ;  it  is 
the  idea  of  God  as  our  Father.  “When  ye  pray, 
say,  Father.”*  If  you  are  a  flagrant  and  open 
sinner,  if  you  are  a  man  who  has  spent  all  his 
living,  all  that  God  gave  him  of  talent,  of  wealth, 
of  power,  of  personality,  in  a  waste  of  shame,  if 
you  are  that  kind  of  sinner,  God  is  still  your 

*  It  seems  certain  that  this  was  the  form  in  which 
Christ  gave  the  prayer  to  his  disciples :  not  “Our 
Father,”  but  “Father.” 


88 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 


Father,  and  when  He  sees  you  a  great  way  off, 
He  makes  haste  to  come  to  meet  you. 

If  you  are  another  kind  of  sinner,  an  alto¬ 
gether  respectable,  narrow-minded,  censorious 
prig,  who  is  always  judging  other  people,  who 
cannot  just  be  glad  of  somebody  else’s  happiness, 
but  must  always  be  thinking  how  much  more  he 
deserves  it  himself,  if  you  are  that  extraordi¬ 
narily  disagreeable  person,  the  prig,  still  God  is 
your  Father. 

I  often  think  that  the  attitude  of  the  Father  to 
the  elder  son  is  even  more  wonderful  than  his 
forgiveness  of  the  younger.  It  is  so  much  more 
difficult  to  be  loving  to  the  self-righteous  than  it 
is  to  the  prodigal  son !  People  often  say  to  me, 
“I  wish  that  end  of  the  parable  were  not  there. 
I  should  like  it  to  stop  at  the  point  where  they 
all  begin  to  rejoice,  “This  my  son  was  dead  and 
he  is  alive  again;  he  was  lost  and  he  is  found.” 
But  whenever  I  find  myself  guilty  of  some  harsh 
judgment,  some  censorious,  narrow-minded  atti¬ 
tude  toward  other  people,  I  thank  God  for  the 
last  part  of  that  parable  that  tells  us  that  God 
still  loves  us,  whatever  our  faults,  whether  they 

89 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

are  flagrant  or  whether  they  are  merely  dis¬ 
agreeable  !  Well,  that  is  the  center  of  this  para¬ 
ble — the  Fatherhood  of  God,  which  nothing  can 
destroy. 

In  that  parable,  which  has  been  described  as 
the  supreme  parable,  which,  if  we  had  it,  would 
give  us  the  heart  of  Christianity  though  all  the 
rest  were  gone,  there  is  no  Christ  at  all.  Is  not 
that  strange?  Did  not  Christ  want  to  make  us 
understand  that  it  is  not  God  who  requires  a 
mediator  between  Himself  and  his  children,  but 
the  children  who  have  so  misunderstood  and  so 
wandered  from  their  Father  that  they  require  a 
mediator  to  make  them  understand  what  He  is 
really  like.  “God  was  in  Christ  reconciling  the 
world  unto  Himself,”  not  reconciling  Himself 
unto  the  world,  for  God  never  was  alienated 
from  us;  it  was  we  who  were  alienated  from 
God. 

So  Jesus  Christ  gives  to  us  this  supreme  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  Christian  religion,  in  it  no  media¬ 
tor,  no  advocate,  because  the  supreme  revelation 
of  God  is  that  his  love  is  so  perfect  that  He 
requires  no  one  to  stand  between  Him  and  his 

90 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

children;  it  is  He  himself  who  comes  to  meet  us; 
for  a  moment  Christ  leaves  out  of  account  our 
own  desperate  need  of  a  mediator  to  stand  be¬ 
tween  us  and  God. 

We  need  Him  indeed,  for  without  Christ 
what  should  we  know  of  God?  Our  need  we 
cannot  overestimate.  It  is  Christ  who  makes 
us  “at  one”  again  with  our  Father.  This  is  the 
true  doctrine  of  the  Atonement,  which  is  the 
very  heart  of  the  Christian  faith.  Had  we 
always  thought  of  the  Atonement  thus, — as  the 
revelation  to  us,  forlorn  and  hopeless,  of  the 
nature  and  the  love  of  God, — it  would  never 
have  become  the  hard  and  terrible  doctrine  it  has 
been  made  by  those  theologians  who  have  inter¬ 
preted  it  in  the  terms  of  the  law-court  rather 
than  the  home,  of  the  judge,  rather  than  of  the 
father. 

Well,  that  is  the  supreme  expression — is  it  not? 

— of  the  Fatherhood  of  God,  and  the  Fatherhood 
of  God  was  the  supreme  teaching  of  Jesus  of 
Nazareth.  That  is  the  heart  of  the  Christian 
religion,  the  love  of  God  for  the  world ;  that 
God  is  love,  that  love  is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law, 

91 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

that  to  love  God  and  your  neighbor  is  greater 
than  anything  else  in  the  world ;  that  on  these 
two  hang  all  the  law  and  the  prophets,  that  “he 
that  dwelleth  in  love  dwelleth  in  God,  and  God 
in  him.”  That  is  the  heart  of  the  Christian 
religion.  You  do  not  find  it  in  any  other  gospel. 

It  is  true  that  there  are  many  other  aspects  of 
God  which  our  Lord  taught  to  us  in  many  para¬ 
bles.  God  is  our  judge,  He  is  our  creditor  to 
whom  we  owe  more  than  we  can  ever  repay. 
He  is  sometimes  shown  to  us  as  an  officer  in  a 
court,  as  a  legislator  who  lays  down  the  laws  by 
which  we  must  live,  as  our  captain,  our  host,  or 
our  king.  The  parables  which  give  us  the  idea  of 
God  as  a  judge  or  a  legislator  or  a  captain  or  a 
leader  or  a  creditor,  are  reported  by  all  the 
evangelists  again  and  again,  for  these  things  are 
easy  for  a  man  to  understand.  When  our  Lord 
looked  over  his  audience,  He  saw  those  who, 
from  the  beginning  of  time,  have  been  engaged 
in  making  laws  and  administering  them,  people 
who  have  created  states,  who  have  built  up  king¬ 
doms,  carried  on  wars,  have  been  interested  in  all 
that  side  of  life,  and  He  said  to  them,  “God  is 

92 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

your  captain,  He  is  your  leader,  your  legislator, 
your  eternal  judge,”  and  into  the  consciousness 
of  every  man  present  that  teaching  entered  and 
was  not  forgotten. 

But  the  woman  has  lived  in  the  home,  and  when 
Christ  said,  “When  ye  pray,  say,  Father,”  He 
was  saying  the  thing  that  was  most  real  to  her. 

She  had  not  been  making  states  or  laws  or  wars ; 
she  was  not  an  officer  administering  the  laws  of 
her  country;  or  a  creditor,  for  she  rarely  had 
any  property ;  she  was  not  in  that  side  of  life  at 
all.  But  all  her  life,  in  all  the  world  and  in 
every  civilization  and  before  civilization,  from 
the  very  beginning  of  humanity,  she  had  made 
homes  and,  therefore,  when  Christ  says  to  her,  “A 
certain  man  had  two  sons,”  she  understood,  and 
the  thing  stayed  in  her  mind. 

When  teaching  is  given  to  you,  it  must  meet 
with  some  response  in  you,  must  it  not?  If  some¬ 
thing  is  said  to  you  that  has  no  relation  to  any¬ 
thing  in  your  life,  it  passes  by  you ;  you  do  not 
remember  it.  That  is  why  our  Lord  is  so  careful 
to  give  an  instance  from  the  man’s  life  and  from 
the  woman’s,  so  that  each  may  remember.  So 

93 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

this  fundamental  principle  of  Christianity  fas¬ 
tened  itself  upon  the  minds  of  that  little  group 
of  women,  and  the  one  thing  among  all  that  they 
remembered  best  was  that  God  was  like  a  Father 
who  forgave  his  children  always,  whatever  they 
did,  and  that  the  relationship  between  God  and 
man  is  the  relationship  that  you  find  in  an  ideal 
home. 

Now  that  parable,  humanly  speaking,  would 
have  been  lost  to  the  world  but  for  the  women 
who  remembered  it.  God  gave  it  to  them  to  re¬ 
member  what  all  the  other  evangelists  had  for¬ 
gotten,  though  it  was  fundamental ;  for  although 
God  is  our  judge,  our  creditor,  our  legislator  and 
our  captain,  He  is  supremely  our  Father.  Other 
religions  have  taught  that  God  was  our  captain 
and  our  judge  and  our  lawgiver;  it  did  not  need 
Christ  to  come  into  the  world  to  tell  us  that.  We 
could  have  learned  that  from  smaller  teachers. 
But  that  God  was  our  Father! — that  was  the 
supreme  thing,  and  that  was  remembered  best  of 
all  by  women. 

That  is  what  I  mean  when  I  say  that  I  believe 
that  women  have  an  especial  contribution  to  give, 

94 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

not  only  to  the  practical  affairs  of  life,  but  to  its 
thinking  and  to  its  idealism.  And  is  it  not  true 
that  the  supreme  need  of  the  world  at  this  hour 
is  a  more  vivid  conception  of  the  Fatherhood  of 
God?  Is  it  not  true  that  the  one  change  that  we 
want  to  make  in  the  hearts  of  men  to-day  is  that 
change  which  shall  enable  them  to  cease  thinking 
of  the  world  as  a  battlefield  and  to  begin  thinking 
of  it  as  a  home?  If  we  could  grasp  the  idea 
above  all  ideas,  that  God  is  our  Father  and  that 
the  brotherhood  of  the  nations  and  the  brother¬ 
hood  of  man  is  the  supreme  consequence  of  this 
supreme  truth,  should  we  not  already  have 
created  an  entirely  different  atmosphere  for  the 
new  world  to  grow  up  in  ? 

The  duty  of  warfare,  as  it  has  been  conceived 
in  the  past,  conflicts  to-day  with  our  new  concep¬ 
tion  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  For  generations, 
we  have  been  content  to  sit  in  our  homes  and  to 
make  them  as  lovely,  as  divinely  gentle  and 
human  and  beautiful  as  possible,  but  we  have  not 
yet  given  to  the  world  that  wider  conception 
which  makes  this  world  of  God  simply  one  vast 
home  for  the  nations  that  live  in  it. 


95 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

If  we  had  got  that  simple  conception  of  God, 
which  is  that,  supremely,  He  is  Love ;  that  love  is 
the  fulfilling  of  the  law ;  that  no  sin  can  stand 
against  it  and  no  doctrine  be  weighed  in  com¬ 
parison  with  it ;  that  Christ  is  the  Way,  the 
Truth  and  the  Life  above  all  in  this,  that  He  was 
the  supreme  expression  of  Love,  and  that,  “He 
that  dwelleth  in  love,  dwelleth  in  God,”  surely  the 
whole  world  would  already  begin  to  be  changed. 

Put  into  your  religion  your  intelligence,  put, 
for  God’s  sake,  your  brains  into  your  faith,  and 
when  you  are  helping  to  work  out  the  theology 
of  Christianity,  you  will,  I  am  certain,  be  able 
to  bring  to  it  a  certain  depth  and  a  certain  sim¬ 
plicity  which  must  move  the  world. 

After  all,  though  it  was  a  woman  probably 
who  alone  remembered  this  parable,  all  the 
world  has  seized  on  it  as  the  very  heart  of  the 
teaching  of  Christ.  If  we  could  realize  from  that 
parable  the  essential  simplicity  of  the  gospel, 
would  it  be  possible  for  us  to  persecute  one  an¬ 
other,  to  divide  the  Church  of  Christ  into  warring 
sects,  to  make  of  things  that  are  not  fundamental 
barriers  between  Christians? 


96 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

I  do  not  for  a  moment  deprecate  the  impor¬ 
tance  of  clear  thinking.  The  idea  that  holiness 
and  silliness  ought  rightly  to  go  together  is  ab¬ 
horrent  to  me ;  the  idea  that  Christians  are  all  the 
better  for  being  slightly  mentally  deficient  is  one 
of  the  most  blasphemous  doctrines !  Christians 
ought  to  be  the  most  clear  thinking,  the  most 
efficient  people  in  any  state. 

But  let  us  distinguish  between  what  is  funda¬ 
mental  and  what  is  not.  Let  us  follow  Christ 
because  we  love  Him.  Is  not  that  the  heart  of 
his  appeal :  What  did  He  ever  ask  of  anyone  but 
that  they  should  look  at  life  through  his  eyes, 
think  of  God  and  man  and  serve  them  as  He  did  ? 

Love  Him!  You  will  not  find  anyone  who  came 
to  follow  Him,  who  came  desiring  to  follow  Him, 
offered  any  other  test  than  that.  Could  they 
drink  of  the  cup  that  He  was  to  drink?  If  so, 
they  were  his  disciples. 

As  we  love  our  Lord  more  and  more  and  fol¬ 
low  Him  more  and  more  closely,  we  realize  more 
and  more  who  and  what  He  was.  To  that  appeal 
He  Himself  trusted  absolutely.  Love  was  to 
Him  not  only  a  gospel,  a  principle,  a  sermon,  it 

97 


Woman’s  Service  to  Theology 

was  a  life,  and  He  said  to  us,  “Love  is  the  ful¬ 
filling  of  the  law.  He  that  dwelleth  in  love 
dwelleth  in  God.” 

That  translation  of  the  world’s  values  into  the 
value  of  life  is  very,  very  hard  for  narrow,  selfish, 
limited  human  imagination  to  make,  but  it  is,  I 
believe,  the  supreme  need,  both  of  the  Church  and 
the  world  at  this  hour,  and  it  is  because  I  believe 
that  women,  from  their  very  experience  through¬ 
out  the  ages,  do  instinctively  seize  upon  that 
aspect  of  our  Lord’s  teaching  as  the  one  eternal 
truth  for  them,  because  they  responded  as  pos¬ 
sibly  men  could  not  in  the  same  degree  respond 
to  his  teaching  that  the  world  is  a  home,  that 
men  are  brothers  and  that  God  is  our  Father, 
that  I  believe  passionately  that  the  women  of  this 
generation  have  in  their  hands,  if  they  will 
choose  to  use  it,  the  power  that  will  change  the 
world. 


98 


The  Law  of  Life 


' 'When  he,  the  Spirit  of  truth,  is  come,  he  shall 
guide  you  into  all  the  truth.” 

“Every  good  gift  and  every  perfect  gift  is  from 
above,  and  cometh  down  from  the  Father  of 
lights,  with  whom  is  no  variableness,  neither 
shadow  of  turning.” 


The  Law  of  Life. 


In  the  great  discourse  at  the  close  of  the  gospel 
of  St.  John  our  Lord  promised  his  guidance  and 
the  guidance  of  God  to  those  who  should 
come  after  Him ;  “When  he,  the  Spirit  of 
Truth,  is  come,  he  will  guide  you  into  all  truth.” 
And  then  in  the  Epistle  of  St.  James  there  is  this 
verse:  “Every  good  gift,  and  every  perfect  gift, 
is  from  above,  and  cometh  down  from  the 
Father  of  Lights  with  whom  is  no  variableness, 
neither  shadow  of  turning.” 

First  of  all,  there  is  a  promise  that  we  shall 
advance  in  knowledge  of  the  truth ;  and  secondly, 
there  is  the  assurance  that  it  is  not  God  who 
changes,  it  is  not  the  truth  that  varies,  for  God 
is  always  the  same, — “In  Him  is  no  variableness, 
neither  shadow  of  turning,” — it  is  in  us  that  the 
change  takes  place,  it  is  we  who  advance  in  the 
knowledge  of  God  who  is  always  the  same. 

101 


The  Law  of  Life 

I  sometimes  think  that  when  I  die  there  will  be 
found  written  on  my  heart  these  words,  “Put 
your  brains  into  your  religion!”  We  are  called 
upon  to  understand  God;  and  I  believe  that  our 
perplexity,  our  difficulties,  would  all  vanish  if  we 
would  receive  the  light  that  God  is  always  giv¬ 
ing  us.  I  believe  that  to  every  generation  there 
is  given  light  enough  for  the  problems  that  face 
it.  You  know  that  at  the  bottom  of  the  sea  there 
are  little  living  organisms,  in  the  deep  places  of 
the  ocean  where  there  is  no  light,  where  it  is 
always  dark,  for  the  light  never  penetrates  to  the 
depths  of  the  sea;  and  those  minute  organisms 
that  live  at  the  bottom  of  the  sea  have  no  vision, 
no  organs  of  sight,  no  eyes,  because  they  do  not 
need  them.  There  is  no  light  and  therefore  there 
is  no  sight.  But  when  we  come  to  those  more 
highly  organized  beings  that  live  on  the  shore, 
we  find  that  they  have  developed  eyes  or  some 
rudimentary  organ  of  sight ;  and  when  we  get  to 
the  higher  creatures,  we  find  the  perfection,  the 
perfecting,  rather,  of  the  sense  of  sight. 

Now  you  see  my  point:  the  light  is  always 
there,  the  sun  is  always  lighting  the  earth,  but  the 

102 


The  Law  of  Life 


creature  develops  the  organ  of  sight  as  his  method 
of  existence  demands  it  and  as  the  problems 
which  he  has  to  face  demand  it.  I  believe  that 
the  problems  which  seem  to  us  so  tremendous 
and  so  complicated — which  are  indeed  very  com¬ 
plicated,  very  large — are  not  beyond  the  light  of 
the  spirit  of  God  and  not  beyond  our  power  to 
solve  if  we  will  only  develop,  in  proportion  to 
our  needs,  our  understanding  of  the  mind  and 
the  purpose  of  God. 

To  every  generation  comes  its  light,  and  per¬ 
haps  the  greatest  light  that  has  come  during  the 
last  century  and  this  century  is  the  advance  of 
modern  science.  I  know  that  there  are  people  to 
whom  it  seems,  strangely  enough,  that  there  is  a 
conflict,  even  a  necessary  conflict,  between  scien¬ 
tific  discovery  and  religion.  Let  me  then  remind 
you  that  if  God  made  the  world ,  the  more  you 
know  about  the  world  the  more  you  know  about 
God.  If  only  religious  people  realized  that,  they 
would  not  have  gone  into  such  a  panic  when 
modern  science  began  to  teach  us  its  great  truths. 

It  is  true  that  when  science  goes  outside  its 
own  province,  it  is  not  always  very  wise.  It  is 

103 


The  Law  of  Life 

possible  that  when  theology  goes  outside  its  own 
province  it  occasionally  makes  mistakes  also ! 
But  within  its  own  province,  which  is  the  descrip¬ 
tion  of  the  material  universe  in  which  we  live, 
science,  in  teaching  us  about  the  universe  that 
God  made,  is  inevitably  teaching  us  something  of 
the  nature  and  the  purpose  of  the  God  who  made 
it.  Let  us  get  hold  of  that  idea,  without  panic, 
and  we  shall  then  be  able  to  take  from  science  the 
great  lessons  which  it  can  teach,  without  losing 
anything  whatever  of  our  sense  of  the  mystery 
and  the  wonder  of  life. 

I  think  the  most  impressive  sermon  that  I  have 
heard  preached  in  a  long  time,  was  preached  in 
London  by  professor  Arthur  Thomson,  our 
greatest  English  biologist — let  me  hurriedly  admit 
that  he  is  really  Scotch,  like  all  our  great  Eng¬ 
lish  people !  Professor  Thomson  preached  on 
“the  wonder  of  the  world,”  and  he  said  to  us : 
“The  idea  that  the  more  you  know  about  the 
world,  the  more  the  sense  of  wonder  and  awe  dis¬ 
appears,  is  a  complete  mistake.  The  more  you 
know  about  the  world,  the  more  you  are  amazed 
at  the  wonder  and  the  beauty  of  it,  the  more  your 

104 


The  Law  of  Life 


spirit  is  smitten  by  a  sense  of  the  ‘infinite  imagi¬ 
nation  of  God/  ” 

Science  has  certainly  taught  us  one  thing;  it 
has  taught  us  this  about  the  world — that  it  is  sub¬ 
ject  to  law.  There  are  many  people  who,  like 
myself,  are  not  scientists,  who  are  perhaps  not 
even  students  of  one  branch  of  science,  who 
could  not  formulate  in  scientific  terms  one  scien¬ 
tific  law.  Yet  the  one  thing  that  you  and  I  have 
grasped  is  that  the  universe  is  governed  by  law. 
As  Dr.  Stanley  Hall  has  said,  “The  world  is 
lawful  to  the  core.” 

You  know  that  if  you  are  going  to  set  out  on 
any  enterprise  that  requires  material  power,  you 
have  first  to  know  the  laws  under  which  that 
power  operates.  Gas  and  steam  and  electricity 
were  in  the  world  from  the  beginning,  but  we  did 
not  understand  the  laws  by  which  they  worked 
and  therefore  we  could  not  control  nor  use  them. 
The  vast  achievements  of  modern  science,  the 
amazing  mastery  that  man  has  acquired  over  the 
material  world,  is  due  not  to  the  invention  of 
new  powers,  but  to  the  discovery  of  their  laws 
and  the  knowledge  that  these  laws  are  never 

105 


The  Law  of  Life 

broken.  If  steam  expands  on  one  day  it  will  ex¬ 
pand  on  another ;  if  it  expands  in  your  mother’s 
kettle  so  as  to  make  the  lid  dance,  it  will  expand 
in  the  power  machines  that  drive  ships  across  the 
sea  and  work  great  factories.  It  always  operates 
in  such  a  way  that  you  can  rely  upon  it.  Power 
acts  according  to  its  own  laws.  Machines  are 
reliable  in  proportion  as  the  law  of  the  power  that 
works  them  is  absolutely  understood. 

The  realization  that  you  cannot  evade  scien¬ 
tific  law  or  swindle  it  or  bribe  it,  that  it  is  not 
open  to  graft,  that  you  cannot  really  do  anything 
with  it  except  understand  it  and  work  with  it 
instead  of  against  it — that  simple  discovery  is 
really  the  root  of  the  enormous  growth  of  power 
which  has  made  man  almost  like  a  god  in  the 
material  world. 

To-day  man  looks  for  the  cause  of  the  thing 
he  wants  or  the  thing  that  he  does  not  want,  and 
when  he  has  found  the  cause,  he  is  master  of 
the  effect.  In  nothing,  I  think,  is  the  power  of 
man  over  the  world  more  remarkable  than  in 
this  particular — that  he  takes  the  world,  he  lives 

106 


The  Law  of  Life 


in  it  and  forces  it  to  be  what  he  wants.  Let  me 
give  you  an  instance : 

The  great  canal  that  has  been  driven  through 
the  Isthmus  of  Panama  was  sought  to  be  driven 
a  long  time  ago.  I  used  to  think  that  the  great 
French  engineer,  De  Lesseps,  failed  to  make  that 
great  canal  because  the  engineering  difficulties 
were  too  great  at  that  time  for  the  skill  of  the  en¬ 
gineer.  That,  as  many  of  you  know,  was  not  the 
reason.  The  real  reason  was  that  the  engineering 
work  was  such  as  demanded  highly  skilled  work¬ 
men  and  could  only  be  carried  through  by  white 
engineers.  But  white  men  could  not  live  on  the 
Isthmus  of  Panama.  They  caught  yellow  fever 
and  died.  And  workman  after  workman  was 
brought  over  to  carry  out  this  work,  being  per¬ 
fectly  competent  to  the  task  but  unable  to  endure 
the  climate. 

Well,  in  the  old  days,  I  suppose  people  would 
have  regarded  that  as  the  will  of  God.  I  notice 
that  when  anything  very  terrible  happens,  people 
always  believe  it  is  the  will  of  God !  There  is  a 
phrase  in  some  insurance  policies  which  says 
that  if  there  is  some  accident  that  is  very  fright- 

107 


The  Law  of  Life 


ful,  it  is  the  “act  of  God.”  That  was  the  old 
idea. 

Now  modern  science  sits  down  and  asks  why. 
Why  do  these  people  die  of  yellow  fever?  Be¬ 
cause  they  are  bitten  by  a  mosquito  which  carries 
the  organism  of  yellow  fever.  Where  does  that 
organism  breed  ?  It  breeds  in  swamps.  Drain  the 
swamp  and  the  organism  cannot  breed.  Yellow 
fever  disappears,  the  white  engineer  is  able  to 
live  there,  and  the  Isthmus  of  Panama  is  cut 
by  the  great  canal. 

That  is  just  an  instance  of  the  way  in  which 
man — not  armed  with  any  really  new  powers, 
because  there  are  no  new  powers  since  all  the 
powers  in  the  universe  that  are  here  now  have 
always  been  here — but  by  this  understanding  of 
the  laws  of  cause  and  effect,  of  the  way  in  which 
energy  works,  has  become  so  much  a  master  of 
the  world  he  lives  in  that  the  wealth  of  modern 
civilization  has  become  almost  staggering. 

When  I  travel  through  a  new  country  like 
yours,  a  great  country  full  of  youth  and  energy, 
my  spirit  is  almost  overwhelmed  by  the  im¬ 
mensity  of  your  material  achievement  and  the 

108 


The  Law  of  Life 


heaped-up  evidences  of  your  wealth.  Then  my 
mind  turns  back  to  Europe,  and  I  realize  that 
the  great  promise  of  modern  science  has  failed. 

Look  at  the  world  and  see  it  famine-stricken, 
diseased,  unhappy.  Even  here  where  there  is 
peace  and  not  war,  I  sometimes  ask  myself 
whether  the  spirit  of  the  American  nation  is 
strong  enough  to  dominate  its  amazing  material 
wealth ;  whether  the  intelligence  of  man  has  not 
outrun  his  spiritual  power;  whether  the  “iron 
man,”  as  you  call  him  over  here,  is  not  almost 
too  strong  and  mighty  for  the  spiritual  man; 
whether  it  is  not  possible  for  modern  science 
with  one  hand  to  destroy  our  very  means  of  sub¬ 
sistence  so  that  we  starve  and  fight  and  die  in 
poverty,  and  with  the  other  to  heap  upon  us 
such  material  wealth  that  the  spirit  is  smothered 
under  it. 

Let  us  then  go  a  little  further.  Science  has 
taught  us  that  the  universe  is  governed  by  law. 
These  laws  are  not  like  the  laws  passed  by  any 
particular  parliament  or  congress,  but  laws  which 
you  cannot  escape,  which  you  cannot  break, 
against  which  you  can  only  break  yourself.  The 

109 


The  Law  of  Life 

man  who  falls  over  a  precipice  and  the  man  who 
flies  in  the  air  are  both  alike  obeying  natural 
law ;  the  law  of  gravitation  is  not  broken  either 
by  the  man  who  flies  or  the  man  who  falls,  but 
one  man  breaks  himself  against  it.  That  is  what 
you  can  do  with  scientific  law.  You  cannot 
escape  it ;  you  cannot  change  it ;  you  cannot  find 
any  part  of  the  world’s  surface  where  it  does 
not  act ;  you  cannot  find  any  day  when  it  gets 
tired ;  you  cannot  find  any  nation  which  can  defy 
or  evade  it.  Everywhere  and  always  and  all  the 
time,  natural  law  is  operating,  and  all  you  can  do 
is  to  work  with  it  or  to  break  yourself  against  it. 

If  that  is  true  of  the  material  world,  which 
God  made,  does  it  not  throw  a  great  light  upon 
the  nature  of  the  God  who  made  it?  In  the 
spiritual  world,  is  God  a  different  God  from 
the  God  who  made  the  universe  that  science  has 
revealed  to  us?  The  Lord  our  God  is  one  God, 
and  if  the  material  universe  is  governed  by 
majestic  and  unchanging  law,  so  is  the  world  of 
the  spirit ;  and  our  too  common  idea  that  the  laws 
of  God  can  be  broken,  that  we  can  dodge  them 
or  evade  them,  or  deceive  God  or  get  round  Him, 

110 


The  Law  of  Life 


or  find  some  weak  moment  in  which  He  will  let 
us  do  what  we  like  without  taking  the  conse¬ 
quences,  all  that  is  as  futile,  as  imbecile,  as  if  a 
person  should  set  to  work  to  build  a  great  build¬ 
ing  in  defiance  of  the  laws  of  building,  and  expect 
God  to  hold  it  up  because  it  was  a  church.  It 
would  fall  down  exactly  as  if  it  were  a  cinemato¬ 
graph  theatre,  if  it  is  built  on  a  wrong  foundation. 

The  man  who  tries  to  get  a  harvest  by  sowing 
the  fields  with  salt  and  then  sitting  down  to  pray, 
is  not  a  religious  man;  he  is  a  fool.  You  know 
it.  And  you  know  that  the  whole  universe  is  so 
governed  by  law  that  to  seek  to  evade  it  is  not  so 
much  wicked  as  childish.  What  you  have  got 
to  do  is  to  understand  it  and  when  you  do  that, 
you  find  in  your  service  powers  so  gigantic  that 
it  makes  one  realize  that  man  is  indeed  made  in 
the  image  of  God,  that  there  is  something  god¬ 
like  in  the  human  intelligence.  But  when  we 
come  to  the  spiritual  world — I  suppose  because 
we  were  frightened  by  science,  because  we  re¬ 
fused  the  light,  because  we  were  afraid,  and  fear 
is  always  the  most  debasing  and  cruel  of  human 
passions — we  fail  to  grasp  the  fact  that  there  are 

111 


The  Law  of  Life 


here  energies  compared  with  which  the  powers 
in  the  material  universe  are  like  the  playthings 
of  a  child’s  nursery;  energies  which  act  accord¬ 
ing  to  immutable  law,  laws  which  we  can  never 
break,  never  evade;  laws  against  which  we  can 
only  break  ourselves. 

I  wish  that  we  could  give  up  altogether  the 
habit  of  talking  about  people  “breaking  the  laws 
of  God.”  You  cannot  break  the  laws  of  God; 
you  might  as  well  talk  about  breaking  the  law  of 
gravitation.  The  laws  of  God  are  not  like  the 
laws  made  by  Man,  nor  is  God  mocked.  The 
spiritual  universe,  which  is  the  soul  of  the  mate¬ 
rial  universe,  of  which  this  material  universe  is 
only  a  beautiful  but  still  inadequate  expression, 
is  governed  by  laws  which  none  can  evade.  When 
you  set  yourself  to  break  the  spiritual  law,  when 
you  think  that,  for  you,  hate  will  do  what  only 
love  will  do,  when  you  try  to  injure  one  member 
and  hope  that  the  whole  body  will  not  suffer, 
when  you  try  to  make  Satan  cast  out  Satan, 
when  you  try  to  serve  both  God  and  Mammon, 
when  you  seek  to  violate  any  of  the  great  princi¬ 
ples  laid  down  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  I  feel 

112 


The  Law  of  Life 


almost  inclined  to  say  to  you  not  so  much  that 
you  are  wicked,  as  that  you  are  stupid ! 

You  cannot  break  the  laws  of  God ;  you  can 
only  break  yourself  against  them.  “Therefore, 
I  say  unto  you,  whosoever  heareth  these  sayings 
of  mine  and  doeth  them  not  shall  be  likened  unto 
a  foolish  man  that  built  his  house  upon  the 
sand.”  If  you  would  translate  that  great  saying 
into  the  language  of  the  Old  Testament,  where 
the  great  truth  of  God’s  power  and  wisdom  is 
given  to  us  without  the  perfection  of  the  revela¬ 
tion  of  Christ,  I  think  you  might  be  told  that 
there  was  something  in  the  nature  of  sand  which 
made  it  peculiarly  holy,  and  that  if  people  built 
on  sand,  God  would  be  angry  with  them  and 
would  smash  their  house.  But  when  you  get 
Christ’s  teaching,  you  find  that  He  appeals  to 
those  immutable  spiritual  laws  which  are  the  very 
expression  of  the  being  of  God.  He  does  not  tell 
you  that  God  will  be  angry.  Is  God  ever  angry 
with  his  children  ?  I  doubt  it.  He  says,  “If  you 
build  on  a  bad  foundation,  your  house  will  fall, 
because  it  is  on  a  bad  foundation.  If  you  build 
on  a  good  foundation,  it  will  stand,  because  it  is 

113 


The  Law  of  Life 

on  a  good  foundation.”  And  if  you  build  your 
civilization  in  defiance  of  the  spritual  law,  all  the 
good  intentions  in  the  world  will  not  hold  it  up, 
because  it  is  built  in  violation  of  the  eternal  laws 
of  God. 

These  precepts  of  Christ,  which  the  world  has 
held  in  contempt,  as  being  so  remote  from  exist¬ 
ence,  so  apart  from  life,  so  impossibly  and  ab¬ 
surdly  idealistic, — “We  cannot  govern,”  said  the 
Lord  Chancellor  of  England,  “according  to  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount,”  and  everybody  laughed 
at  the  idea, — these  principles  which  the  world  has 
derided,  which  the  world  has  perhaps  given  the 
passing  homage  of  calling  them  beautiful  but 
always  with  the  reservation  that  they  are  im¬ 
practicable,  are,  in  fact,  statements  of  funda¬ 
mental  spiritual  laws  which  civilization  can  no 
more  evade  than  it  can  evade  the  operation  of 
material  scientific  law. 

The  time  has  come  for  us  to  grasp  that  “God  is 
without  variableness  or  shadow  cast  by  turning” ; 
that  you  cannot  get  Him  to  change  his  plan,  be¬ 
cause  it  is  a  perfect  plan;  that  you  cannot  deceive 
Him  or  get  Him  to  make  an  exception;  but  you 

114 


The  Law  of  Life 


can  place  yourself  alongside  his  will  instead  of 
against  it.  And  if  you  do  so,  you  find  yourself 
filled  with  spiritual  power  which  can  transcend 
the  difficulties  with  which  you  are  faced.  This  is 
the  meaning  and  the  power  of  prayer. 

What  are  our  difficulties  to-day?  They  are 
difficulties,  I  suppose,  chiefly  of  enormous  com¬ 
plexity.  The  world  for  us  is  so  vast,  so  complex, 
that  its  very  size  constitutes  a  difficulty.  It  seems 
all  beyond  the  brain  of  man.  Well,  man  made  it. 
He  created  this  complex  civilization.  And  if  we 
could  find  those  guiding  principles  which  underlie 
the  vast  heap  of  accumulated  knowledge,  if  we 
could  put  our  hands  upon  those  great  funda¬ 
mental  principles,  all  the  difficulties  would  fall 
into  their  proper  place ;  as,  when  the  scientist  dis¬ 
covers  a  scientific  law,  all  the  facts  and  knowl¬ 
edge  of  other  students  fall  into  their  proper  place, 
and  guide  the  student  of  science  through  the  vast 
mass  of  his  accumulated  knowledge  without  any 
sense  of  confusion,  without  any  sense  of  that 
paralysis  which  to-day  so  clogs  our  spiritual,  reli¬ 
gious,  social,  economic  and  industrial  life. 

Wherever  you  touch  science  you  touch  power. 

115 


The  Law  of  Life 

Some  of  you,  perhaps,  are  students  of  science; 
do  you  not  feel  with  me  that  when  you  get  into 
touch  with  the  work  of  modern  science,  you  find 
yourself  in  the  possession,  or  in  the  presence  at 
least,  of  power;  whereas,  when  you  come  into 
touch  with  religious  life,  or  industrial,  political 
or  economic  life,  you  have  a  tragic  sense  of  in¬ 
competence,  a  feeling  that  the  world  is  too  great 
for  us,  that  the  passions  created  by  the  war 
are  uncontrollable,  that  you  cannot  master  your 
own  civilization?  What  causes  the  difference 
between  these  two  worlds  ?  It  is  not  that  science 
has  a  smaller  field.  The  instruments  of  modern 
science  have  enabled  us  to  bridge  the  distance 
between  ourselves  and  the  remotest  stars,  to 
record  the  existence  of  stars  which  the  human 
eye  can  never  see,  and  to  measure  distances  in 
figures  that  are  merely  fantastic  to  the  human 
imagination :  or,  on  the  other  hand,  to  peer  into 
the  secrets  of  the  universe  so  that  things  too 
small  for  any  instrument  to  reveal  can  still  be 
understood  and  reasoned  about  by  the  human 
mind.  The  field  of  science  is  not  smaller,  it  is 
immeasurably  greater  than  the  field  of  the  politi- 

116 


The  Law  of  Life 


cian  or  the  social  reformer;  and  the  sense  of 
power  that  is  present  in  the  mind  of  the  scientist 
is  due  to  his  apprehension  of  natural  law. 

Let  us,  in  our  idea  of  God,  realize  that  He  is 
trustworthy.  That  is  really  the  secret  of  modern 
scientific  advance — the  discovery  that  the  uni¬ 
verse  is  trustworthy,  that  it  will  not  fail,  that 
power  always  acts  according  to  law.  How  many 
of  us  worship  a  trustworthy  God?  How  many 
pray  still  to  a  God  so  capricious,  so  uncertain,  so 
mysterious,  that  we  cannot  attempt  to  understand 
Him  ?  There  is  no  phrase,  I  suppose,  more  com¬ 
mon  in  the  presence  of  misfortune  and  grief 
than  this,  “We  must  be  resigned  to  the  inscrutable 
will  of  God.”  Inscrutable?  Well,  in  some  ways. 
Of  course,  God  is  so  infinitely  and  immeasurably 
beyond  the  comprehension  of  our  little  human 
minds 'that,  in  a  sense,  at  least,  He  is  and  must 
always  be  mysterious,  just  as  to  the  scientist  life 
itself  is  an  unfathomable  mystery.  But  where 
God  touches  our  human  lives,  there  He  calls  us  to 
understand  Him. 

Our  Lord  often  reproached  his  disciples,  not 
because  they  did  not  love  Him,  for  He  knew  they 

117 


The  Law  of  Life 

did  love  Him ;  but  because  they  did  not  under¬ 
stand  Him.  “Are  ye  also  without  understanding ; 
how  is  it  that  ye  do  not  understand?”  And  to¬ 
day  it  seems  to  me  as  though  that  cry  were  ring¬ 
ing  in  the  ears  of  modern  civilization.  Our 
civilization  was  indeed  built  in  defiance  of  the 
principles  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  and  it  has 
fallen,  and  great  is  the  fall  of  it.  Yet  there  are 
people  who  will  set  to  work  to  rebuild  the  new 
world  on  the  same  principles  of  hate  and  indiffer¬ 
ence,  of  selfishness  and  cowardice  and  suspicion, 
as  the  old.  When  war  comes  and  our  civiliza¬ 
tion  crashes  about  our  ears,  who  is  it  that  will  not 
say,  “We  must  submit  to  the  inscrutable  will  of 
God”  ?  The  will  of  God !  God  who  taught  us 
that  if  we  defied  spiritual  law,  our  house  must 
fall  over  our  heads  as  certainly  as  a  house  built 
in  defiance  of  material  law.  Yet  when  we  built 
it  so  and  it  falls,  we  will  not  admit  that  we  defied 
spiritual  law !  No — it  is  the  “inscrutable  will  of 
God” ! 

To  me,  one  of  the  most  beautiful  of  all  sayings 
is  that  saying  of  Christ,  “Henceforth  I  call  you 
not  servants  (or  as  the  real  word  is,  ‘slaves’), 

118 


The  Law  of  Life 


for  the  slave  knoweth  not  what  his  lord  doeth ; 
but  I  have  called  you  friends,  for  all  things  that 
my  Father  has  given  me,  I  have  made  known  unto 
you.”  How  is  it  that  ye  do  not  understand ? 
How  is  it  that  religious  people  have  made  a  kind 
of  idol  of  not  understanding,  have  preached  that 
it  is  a  virtue  to  be  “resigned  to  the  inscrutable  will 
of  God,”  when  God  gave  us  our  intelligence  and 
calls  us  through  his  Son,  Jesus  Christ,  to  under¬ 
stand  his  great  purpose  ? 

I  believe  that  when  we  once  realize  that  God 
is  trustworthy,  that  He  is  as  reliable,  as  un¬ 
changing  in  the  spiritual  as  in  the  material  world, 
when  we  set  ourselves  no  longer  to  evade  or  to 
defy  the  spiritual  law,  but  to  understand  it  and  to 
work  with  it,  there  will  come  a  spiritual  revival  in 
the  world  compared  with  which  the  scientific  ad¬ 
vance  of  the  last  century  will  seem  a  little  thing. 

Is  it  not  conceivable  that  it  is  your  part  above 
that  of  every  nation  to  make  that  discovery  and 
to  lead  that  revival?  You  are  indeed  in  danger — 
believe  me,  it  is  true — of  being  crushed  under 
the  very  heap  of  your  material  prosperity.  But 
there  is  in  your  hearts  the  possibility  of  love  and 

119 


The  Law  of  Life 

of  peace.  Can  you  not  confront  this  problem 
with  the  certainty  that  the  spiritual  world  is  surg¬ 
ing  with  energy,  if  you  can  only  understand  it 
and  use  it?  Can  you  not  transcend  the  great 
heap  of  your  material  wealth  by  a  spiritual  power 
even  greater?  If  you  can  do  that,  you  will  create 
in  the  world  the  greatest  spiritual  revival  since 
the  coming  of  Christ,  for  you  will  have  begun 
to  enter  into  that  understanding  of  the  laws  of 
God  which  makes  men  the  “friends  of  God  and 
prophets.1 ” 


120 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 


“In  the  beginning  God  created  the  heavens  and 
the  earth” 

“Never  wouldst  thou  have  created  anything  if 
thou  hadst  hated  it.” 

“God  is  love.” 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law. 

I  suppose  if  we  had  always  put  our  brains  into 
our  religion,  we  should  have  known  from  the  first 
verse  of  the  Bible  what  the  last  must  be;  for  if 
God  created  the  heaven  and  the  earth,  God  must 
be  Love. 

When  we  speak  about  God  as  law,  I  know 
that  to  many  people  that  idea  brings  a  sense  of 
strength  and  peace.  To  realize  that  God  is  not 
capricious,  that  He  is  not  uncertain,  that  He  can 
be  relied  upon  with  the  same  absolute  assurance 
as  the  scientific  laws  of  his  universe,  brings  to 
many  distracted  souls  a  sense  of  great  serenity. 
But  to  some  it  seems  rather  a  cold  conception, 
and  I  want  to  remind  such  people  that  if  God  is 
law,  law  can  only  be  understood  in  the  sense  of 
love. 

Love  is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law,  and  when  we 
say  that  God  is  unchanging  and  unfailing,  that 

123 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

He  is  not  capricious,  that  we  can  rely  upon  Him, 
it  is  his  love  that  we  mean — his  love  that  is  un¬ 
changing,  his  love  that  is  never  capricious,  his 
love  of  which  we  can  feel  the  same  absolute  as¬ 
surance  as  we  can  of  the  operation  of  any  scien¬ 
tific  law,  indeed,  much  more  so,  for  what  scien¬ 
tific  law  yet  has  been  perfectly  and  finally  stated  ? 

God  is  Love.  What  proof  have  we  of  that? 
The  world  is  full  of  cruelty !  I  have  said  that  we 
can  tell  something  of  God  if  we  know  something 
of  God’s  world.  Well,  the  world  is  full  of  cruelty 
and  suffering  and  I  suppose  no  one  has  ever  yet 
been  able  to  explain  how  there  could  be  suffering 
and  wrong  in  the  world  God  made  if  God  is  Love. 
There  are  many  things  that  we  cannot  yet  explain. 
Wisdom  will  not  die  with  us ;  there  is  much  yet 
for  those  who  come  after  us  to  learn. 

Yet  I  feel  increasingly  that  the  difficulties  of 
explaining  this  world  in  terms  of  the  love  of 
God,  great  though  they  are — and  I  do  not  under¬ 
estimate  them — are  nevertheless  smaller,  immeas¬ 
urably  smaller  than  the  fundamental  difficulty  of 
believing  that  the  world  could  have  been  made 
at  all,  except  by  love.  For  there  is  no  way  of 

124 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

making  anything  except  by  loving  it;  there  is  no 
other  creative  power. 

To  say  that  God  created  is  to  say  that  God 
loved.  There  is  not  any  other  power  in  the 
universe  that  can  create,  except  the  power  of  love. 

You  all  know  that.  Some  of  you  perhaps  are 
artists  ;  do  you  suppose  that  beauty  was  ever 
created  by  any  person  except  by  someone  who 
loved  beauty?  Is  it  conceivable  that  Beethoven 
wrote  a  great  symphony  without  loving  music? 

Or  that  Michael  Angelo  painted  the  Sistine 
Chapel  without  a  love  of  beauty?  Or  that  any 
beautiful  thing  was  ever  created  since  the  world 
began  except  by  lovers  of  beauty? 

Some  of  you  have  in  your  hearts — all  of  you, 

I  trust — a  great  love  for  your  country.  Do  you 
think  that  any  country  was  ever  built  up  except 
by  its  lovers?  That  any  man  could  make  any¬ 
thing  of  his  country  merely  by  despising  it  or 
criticizing  it  or  hating  it?  You  know  it  so  well 
that  you  do  not  realize  sometimes  that  you  do 
know  it — you  take  it  for  granted  that  it  is  not 
possible  to  create  anything  at  all  except  by  love. 

The  divinest  fact  in  human  nature  is  the  fact 

125 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

that  human  life  comes  into  the  world  through 
human  love;  that  God  has  made  us  such  that, 
by  the  love  of  two  human  beings  for  one  an¬ 
other,  a  third  human  being  is  born  into  the  world. 
Is  it  not  true  that  God  made  us  in  his  own  image, 
since  He  made  us  like  that?  Life  comes  into  the 
world  through  love,  and  everything  that  we  know 
of  comes  into  the  world  through  love,  and  what 
we  must  realize  is  that  there  is  no  creative  force 
in  the  universe  except  love. 

Do  you  know  that  wonderful  passage  from 
Keats’s  Endymion  in  which  the  poet  declares  that 
he  cannot  blame  people  who  forget  everything 
else  in  their  love  for  one  another,  because,  though 
it  may  seem  selfish,  love  itself  is  so  priceless  a  gift 
that  perhaps  they  do  enough  for  the  world  merely 
by  loving. 

As  does  the  nightingale,  up-perched  high, 

And  cloistered  among  cool  and  bunched  leaves — 

She  sings  but  to  her  love,  nor  e’er  conceives 
How  tiptoe  Night  holds  back  her  dark-grey  hood. 

Just  so  may  love,  although  ’tis  understood 
The  mere  commingling  of  passionate  breath, 

Produce  more  than  our  searching  witnesseth : 

126 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

What  I  know  not:  but  who,  of  men,  can  tell 
That  flowers  would  bloom,  or  that  green  fruit  would 
swell 

To  melting  pulp,  that  fish  would  have  bright  mail, 

The  earth  its  dower  of  river,  wood,  and  vale, 

The  meadows  runnels,  runnels  pebble-stones, 

The  seeds  its  harvest,  or  the  lute  its  tones, 

Tones  ravishment,  or  ravishment  its  sweet, 

If  human  souls  did  never  kiss  and  greet? 

That  may  easily  seem  to  you  the  mere  fancy  of 
a  poet,  but  the  world  has  taught  us  during  the 
last  few  years  that  it  is  indeed  love  that  creates 
and  hatred  that  destroys.  What  a  fanciful  idea 
that  flowers  would  not  bloom  nor  fruit  ripen  nor 
the  earth  be  beautiful,  “if  human  hearts  did  never 
kiss  and  greet” !  Well,  those  of  you  who  have 
seen  Europe  during  the  last  few  years,  know  that 
it  is  not  a  mere  fancy.  When  men  hate  each 
other,  the  flowers  do  not  bloom  and  the  corn  does 
not  grow.  The  corn  did  not  grow  in  Flanders 
during  the  war,  there  were  no  flowers,  there  was 
no  color. 

Some  of  you  may  have  seen  Nevinson’s  war 
pictures  and  will  remember  that  there  is  in  them 
an  almost  total  absence  of  color  and  beauty  and 

127 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

life;  nothing  but  stretches  of  dreary  mud,  nothing 
but  a  few  human  beings  in  mud-colored  clothes, 
nothing  but  dreariness,  destruction  and  waste. 

If  you  cannot  believe  that  love  creates,  look  at 
the  other  side  of  the  picture  and  you  will  see  how 
hatred  destroys.  It  is  of  the  nature  of  hatred  to 
destroy.  If  you  want  to  destroy,  hate;  but  if 
you  want  to  create,  you  must  love.  If  you  cannot 
love,  if  there  is  in  your  heart  so  much  pain,  so 
great  a  resentment  at  the  cruelty  of  society,  that 
you  must  hate  either  a  nation  or  a  race  or  a 
class,  I  do  not  condemn  you.  What  human  being 
will  dare  to  condemn  one  who  has  suffered  such 
intolerable  things  that  he  finds  in  his  heart  noth¬ 
ing  but  hatred? 

There  are  people  whom  I  have  known,  of 
whom  it  would  amaze  me  if  they  could  feel  any¬ 
thing  but  hatred.  I  do  not  for  a  moment  con¬ 
demn  such  people.  God  forbid.  Only  I  say  to 
them:  “Do  not  deceive  yourselves.  If  you  have 
nothing  in  your  heart  but  hate,  stand  out  from 
the  progress  of  the  world.  You  cannot  help  it 
perhaps.  But  unless  there  is  love  in  your  heart, 
you  can  do  nothing.  It  is  as  senseless  to  hope 

128 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

it  as  to  dream  that  with  your  hands  full  of  salt 
you  can  raise  a  harvest.  It  may  be  that  you  have 
nothing  in  your  hands  but  salt;  it  may  be  that 
you  have  nothing  in  your  heart  but  bitterness; 
perhaps  that  is  not  your  fault;  but  it  makes  you 
a  useless  person  in  the  building  up  of  the  world.” 

Remember  that  it  is  as  certain  as  the  material 
law  that  you  cannot  raise  a  harvest  without  seed, 
that  you  must  have  love  when  you  want  to  raise 
a  harvest  of  that  which  has  in  it  the  mysterious 
quality  of  life.  What  is  the  difference  between 
the  living  grain  and  the  dead  chemical  thing 
with  which  you  might  imitate  it?  Who  knows? 

No  scientist  can  tell  you.  No  scientist  can  make 
life  where  there  is  not  life.  He  cannot  tell  you 
what  it  is,  this  mysterious  principle  out  of  which 
comes  life,  but  he  can  tell  you  that  unless  life  is 
present  in  the  seed,  you  cannot  grow  your  har¬ 
vest.  To  offer  things  that  are  dead,  dead  chemi¬ 
cals,  lifeless  salt  for  seed,  and  ask  a  harvest 
from  them  is  senseless. 

In  the  same  way,  in  the  spiritual  world,  those 
who  are  filled  with  hatred  are  useless.  Pity  them, 
but  do  not  expect  from  them  anything,  for  they 

129 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

have  nothing  to  give  that  has  in  it  the  divine 
quality  of  creation.  That  is  to  be  found  only  in 
love.  To  my  mind,  the  most  pitiful  thing  on 
earth  is  to  see  human  beings,  disappointed  by  the 
tragedy  of  war,  setting  to  work  to  build  up  a 
better  state  of  things  by  hating  somebody  else. 
They  cease  to  hate  Germany  and  they  begin  to 
hate  capitalists ;  they  cease  to  hate  Russia  and 
they  begin  to  hate  France;  they  cease  to  hate  a 
nation  and  they  begin  to  hate  a  class.  And  they 
always  hope  in  some  way,  out  of  this  dead  de¬ 
structive  quality  of  hate,  to  create  a  new  world. 
What  is  tragic  in  them  is  not  so  much  their 
wickedness — for  those  of  you  who  know  what  the 
suffering  of  the  last  seven  years  has  been,  will  not 
be  ready  to  condemn  them — it  is  the  utter,  hope¬ 
less  futility  of  trying  to  create  a  new  world  with 
that  which  is  the  very  instrument  and  principle 
of  destruction. 

Do  you  remember  the  dialogue  between  Shy- 
lock  and  his  accusers  in  Shakespeare’s  great  play, 
“The  Merchant  of  Venice”  in  which  Bassanio 
asks  the  Jew — “Kills  every  man  the  thing  that  he 
does  hate?”  And  Shylock  answers,  “Hates  any 

130 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

man  the  thing  he  would  not  kill?”  I  used  to 
think  that  was  a  debating  point.  I  see  now  there 
lies  in  it  a  whole  philosophy.  If  you  hate,  you 
want  to  destroy.  “Hates  any  man  the  thing  he 
would  not  kill?”  You  want  to  destroy  a  man’s 
body  or  his  happiness  or  his  soul,  for  hate  in  itself 
is  the  very  principle  of  destruction.  In  the  same 
sense,  love  is  the  principle  of  creation  and  it  is 
more  difficult  to  explain  how  the  work  could  come 
to  be  at  all,  except  from  the  heart  of  a  God  of 
love,  than  it  is  to  explain  any  of  the  cruelties  that 
mar  God’s  world. 

To  explain  these  cruelties  is  difficult  enough; 
but  nothing  could  be  so  senseless,  so  stultifying, 
nothing  would  make  one  feel  the  world  more 
chaotic  than  to  suppose  that  the  creation  of  this 
great  universe,  or  the  creation  of  any  single  thing 
in  the  universe  could  come  except  by  love.  For 
love  alone  can  create. 

Now,  there  is  another  side  to  all  this.  God  is 
Love.  “He  that  dwelleth  in  love,  dwelleth  in 
God,  and  God  in  him.”  God  creates  us  in  his  own 
image,  but  that  image  has  been  distorted  and 
blurred,  and  what  we  have  now  to  do  is  to  create 

131 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

that  nobler  Humanity,  that  more  sensitive, 
stronger,  more  spiritual  Humanity,  that  shall  be 
able  to  cope  with  the  great  problems  of  our 
twentieth  century  civilization.  I  say  more  sensi¬ 
tive  as  well  as  stronger,  for  one  of  the  things 
that  women  must  teach  the  world,  I  think,  is 
that  sensitiveness  is  a  sign  of  spiritual  power 
and  not  of  spiritual  weakness. 

Blake’s  great  poem,  “Jerusalem,”  came  from 
the  same  mind  as  a  little  couplet  that  expresses 
just  what  I  want  to  say  about  the  sensitiveness  of 
those  who  are  spiritually  strong : 

“A  robin  red  breast  in  a  cage 
Puts  all  heaven  in  a  rage.” 

That  lovely  little  expression  of  tenderness  ex¬ 
presses  a  conviction  that  sensitiveness  to  suffer¬ 
ing  goes  along  with  a  nobler  and  a  more  power¬ 
ful  civilization.  I  have  suggested  to  you  that  it 
is  your  business  to  create  a  type  of  Humanity 
which  shall  be  adequate  to  the  needs  of  the  world, 
and  you  perhaps  ask  yourselves,  “How  is  that  to 
be  done?” 

Well,  we  have  our  divine  pattern.  Christ  came 

132 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

to  show  us  not  only  what  God  is,  but  what  man 
should  be.  When  Pontius  Pilate  brought  Him 
out  to  the  people  and  said,  “Ecce  Homo”  (Behold 
the  Man),  he  meant  no  more  than — “Behold  the 
man  of  whom  we  speak,  the  man  to  whom  you 
have  preferred  Barabbas.”  It  was  Pilate’s  last 
appeal  to  the  better  judgment  of  the  people. 

He  hoped  by  bringing  Christ  out  to  them  to  move 
them  to  something  like  remorse.  He  brought 
Him  out  in  all  his  majesty,  and  said,  “Behold  the 
Man !”  That  was  all  the  words  meant  to  Pilate ; 
but  Humanity  has  seized  upon  that  phrase  which 
meant  so  little  to  the  speaker,  and  read  into  it, 

“Ecce  Homo — Behold  Mankind !”  Behold  the 
Man — The  Man,  that  which  Humanity  should 
be,  the  perfect  conception  of  God.  And  the  man 
of  the  future,  the  Humanity  for  which  we  are 
looking,  must  catch  the  spirit  of  this  Christ,  and 
grow  up  to  the  measure  of  his  stature.  That  can 
be  done  as  all  creation  is  done,  by  love. 

To  grow  like  Christ,  it  is  only  necessary  to 
love  Him,  and  to  love  Him  it  is  only  necessary  to 
know  Him.  I  defy  anyone  to  read  the  gospels 
and  not  love  the  Personality  that  is  there  de- 

133 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

picted.  It  is  not  possible  to  get  into  the  mind  of 
Jesus  of  Nazareth;  to  follow  Him  as  He  went 
about  the  world ;  to  read  his  words ;  to  read  the 
record  of  his  acts;  to  get  inside  his  mind,  as 
far  as  that  may  be,  to  look  at  God  and  man 
through  his  eyes,  and  not  to  love  Him.  And 
love  is  creative;  love  creates  us  in  the  image  of 
that  which  we  love. 

In  the  beginning,  God  created  us  in  his  own 
image,  but  He  has  never  ceased  to  re-create  us  in 
his  image,  and  He  does  it  by  the  same  means — 
which  are  indeed  the  only  means — by  love.  To 
those  of  you  to  whom  the  great  ideals  of  world- 
service  are  attractive  and  inspiring,  I  would  say, 
do  not  lose  touch  and  communion  with  that  great 
Spirit  which  moved  the  world  as  no  one  else  has 
ever  moved  it;  Who  did  what  you  and  I  would 
give  our  lives  to  do ;  Who  lifted  the  world  out  of 
the  rut  and  set  it  on  a  new  course;  Who  did, 
I  repeat,  what  we  would  die  to  do — gave  the 
world  a  new  angle  of  vision,  a  new  conception  of 
God. 

It  is  possible  for  every  one  of  you  to  serve  Hu¬ 
manity,  and  whatever  are  your  circumstances  you 

134 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

can  always  look  at  your  life  as  a  service  to  God 
and  Humanity.  There  are  no  circumstances  in 
which  that  is  impossible. 

But  to  serve  Humanity,  enthusiasm  and  hope 
are  not  enough.  Anyone  may  be  carried  away  by 
a  wave  of  emotion,  anyone  may  be  inspired  by 
the  idea  of  working  for  Humanity;  but  such 
enthusiasm,  such  inspiration  are  not  enough. 

There  is  no  life  so  difficult,  there  is  no  experience 
so  searching,  as  the  life  that  is  lived  in  the  service 
of  Humanity.  It  requires  a  self-denial  more 
fundamental  and  more  searching  than  mere  self- 
sacrifice. 

Our  Lord  said,  “If  anyone  would  be  my  dis¬ 
ciple,  let  him  deny  himself.”  That  is  something 
infinitely  deeper  than  to  sacrifice  yourself.  There 
are  people  who  have  developed  such  an  irritating 
habit  of  sacrificing  themselves  that  it  is  almost 
impossible  to  live  with  them !  I  have  known 
people  who,  in  the  name  of  religion,  are  always 
doing  what  they  do  not  want  to  do.  I  have 
known  an  entire  family  of  which  every  member 
persistently  does  that  which  he  does  not  want 
to  do,  so  that  the  other  members  may  do  what 

135 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

they  want  to  do ;  and  as  all  of  them  have  this  same 
persistency  in  doing  what  they  dislike  doing,  all 
of  them  live  in  a  state  of  nervous  strain. 

It  is  sometimes  your  duty  to  assert  yourself, 
and  it  is  often  nothing  but  sloth  and  moral 
cowardice  that  prevents  you  from  doing  it.  Self- 
sacrifice  is  sometimes  the  easier  way.  Self-denial 
is  never  easy.  It  means  that  you  can  so  silence 
your  clamorous  egotism,  so  put  yourself  out  of 
your  own  reckoning  and  your  own  consideration, 
that  you  can  look  at  your  own  problems,  your 
own  personality,  and  your  own  work  as  though 
it  were  someone  else’s. 

You  are  to  love  your  neighbor  as  yourself ; 
you  are  to  love  yourself  as  your  neighbor,  not  to 
hate  yourself.  That  is  the  asceticism  of  other 
Eastern  religions.  But  you  must  deny  yourself — 
deny  yourself — treat  yourself  with  the  same  jus¬ 
tice  that  you  seek  to  give  to  others.  That  is  in¬ 
comparably  harder  than  merely  to  choose  always 
the  thing  you  do  not  want  to  do,  always  to  take 
the  disagreeable  path !  I  have  known  scores  of 
people  who  have  said,  “I  chose  to  do  so  and  so, 
because  it  was  what  I  did  not  want  to  do.”  That 

136 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

* 

is  stupid  and  futile.  It  is  not  Christianity — it  is 
a  lack  of  moral  courage. 

When  you  desire  to  serve  Humanity,  you  some¬ 
times  have  to  sacrifice  yourself  and  sometimes  to 
assert  yourself.  You  have  to  be  an  instrument 
in  the  hands  of  God  for  whatever  He  desires  you 
to  do ;  you  may  be  forced  into  the  limelight  when 
you  hate  it,  or  kept  in  the  shadow  when  you 
hate  that. 

How  much  public  work  has  been  ruined  be¬ 
cause  the  people  who  did  it  were  not  fine  enough 
for  the  service  of  Humanity !  Every  weak  place 
in  your  character,  every  inclination  to  be  slothful, 
every  tendency  to  be  dishonest,  every  unwilling¬ 
ness  to  put  your  work  before  yourself,  every  atom 
of  moral  cowardice  will  come  out  under  the 
strain.  Over  and  over  again,  as  you  face  your 
problems,  you  will  realize  that  if  you  had  been 
finer  in  the  past,  if  you  had  the  habit  of  denying 
yourself,  if  you  had  nothing  in  your  mind  but  the 
glory  of  God  and  the  service  of  man,  you  would 
see  what  was  the  right  thing  to  do.  You  would 
be  able  to  do  it  just  so,  and  just  right;  and  you 
cannot  because  you  are  not  fine  enough. 

137 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

It  is  a  spiritual  discipline  of  the  most  searching 
kind,  to  serve  your  fellow  men.  In  many  people 
to-day,  the  appeal  to  save  their  own  souls  strikes 
no  responsive  chord.  If  all  the  world  goes  down 
into  hell,  what  does  it  matter  if  you  and  I  go 
down  also?  But  when  you  realize  that  you 
could  have  saved  the  world  from  hell,  that  you 
could  have  set  it  on  a  better  path,  if  you  yourself 
had  been  more  like  Christ,  had  been  a  finer  and 
a  stronger  person,  then  there  comes  that  agony 
of  repentance  which  St.  Peter  felt,  when  he  cried 
out  to  our  Lord,  “Depart  from  me,  for  I  am  a 
sinful  man,  O  Lord !” 

At  that  moment,  recall  to  yourselves  the  fact 
that  love  is  still,  as  always,  creative;  that  what¬ 
ever  your  failures,  your  weaknesses,  your  limita¬ 
tions,  it  is  still,  and  always,  possible  to  make  of 
your  life  not  that  decent,  possible  respectable 
thing  which  perhaps  almost  all  of  us  are  begin¬ 
ning  to  hope  for,  but  that  glory  which  enables 
us  to  say,  “I  live,  yet  not  I,  but  Christ  liveth  in 
me !” 

The  power  by  which  God  created  us  in  the  be¬ 
ginning  is  still  in  the  universe  and  is  still  all- 

138 


Love,  the  Fulfilling  of  the  Law 

powerful,  and  my  last  word  to  you  would  be,  not 
of  those  great  problems,  those  universal  world¬ 
wide  hopes  and  dangers  and  doubts  which  we 
know  so  well,  but  rather  to  remind  you  that  the 
solution  of  all  these  things  depends  upon  the  in¬ 
dividual  seeing  and  following  God ;  that  to  every 
one  of  us  there  is  given  the  glorious  possibility  of 
having  born  in  our  own  hearts  the  spirit  of  Christ. 

“In  the  beginning,  God  created  the  heaven  and 
the  earth.”  ....  Never  could  He  have  created 

anything  if  He  had  hated  it . “God  is 

love.”  ....  “He  that  dwelleth  in  love,  dwelleth 
in  God  and  God  in  him.”  ....  “Beloved,  if  God 
so  loved  the  world,  we  ought  also  to  love  one 
another.” 


139 


Sex  and  Common  Sense 


BY 

A.  MAUDE  ROYDEN 


These  much  discussed  addresses  by  Miss 
Maude  Royden  are,  to  use  her  own  words,  in¬ 
tended  “to  provoke  discussion  and  engender 
light.”  Much  of  the  book,  therefore,  is  of  a 
controversial  character,  and  Miss  Royden  does 
not  hesitate  to  attack  what  she  believes  to  be 
wrong,  whether  it  is  with  regard  to  our  laws 
about  marriage,  our  refusal  to  let  light  in  on  the 
problems  of  sex,  or  the  more  recent  tendency  to 
preach  moral  anarchy  as  their  sole  solution. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 


Chap.  1. 
Chap.  2. 
Chap.  3. 


Chap.  4. 
Chap.  5. 

Chap.  6. 
Chap.  7. 
Chap.  8. 
Chap.  9. 

Chap.  10. 


The  Old  Problem  Intensified  by  the 
Disproportion  of  the  Sexes. 

A  Solution  of  the  Problem  of  the  Un¬ 
married. 

Consideration  of  Other  Solutions  of 
the  Problem  of  the  Disproportion  of 
the  Sexes. 

The  True  Basis  of  Morality. 

The  Moral  Standard  of  the  Future: 
What  Should  It  Be? 

A  Plea  for  Light. 

Friendship. 

Misunderstandings. 

Further  Misunderstandings  :  The  Need 
for  Sex  Chivalry. 

“The  Sin  of  the  Bridegroom.” 


Published  by  G.  P.  PUTNAM’S  SONS,  New  York 


Princeton  Theological .Seminanj,, Libraries 


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